Google Search Stars

There may be stars in your eyes, soon. Google has introduced a search facility that lets you star certain search results, in effect marking them as “faves” the way that Google Reader does. Then those items will show up in a special box at the top of your searches — whenever they’re relevant, of course.

The Official Google Blog uses the example of having “starred” your favourite football teams’ websites. A subsequent search for “nfl,” for example, will bring these up in the star box.

In my view, the idea has merit as a substitute for bookmarks in certain contexts. This, in effect, lets the Google relevance machine manage your “starmarks” for you. They’ll even manage the business of attaching a star to a site when you’re not in a search, provided you have the Google Toolbar installed:

Stars sync with your Google Bookmarks and the Google Toolbar, so you can always see your list of starred items in one place and easily organize them. Even beyond the results page, while browsing the web you can quickly click the star icon in Toolbar to create a bookmark, and those pages will start showing up in the new stars feature.

(A Google Chrome and Firefox extension would make a lot of sense here.)

Google is rolling the facility out over the next few days. I don’t yet have it on my Google.com searches. And I don’t know whether the rollout includes Google.ca as well.

[via ResearchBuzz]