Google Stars, the long-rumored bookmarking service from Google, has now publicly launched, but with little fanfare. That Google was working to update its bookmarking service has been known for some time. In May, a developer who had been digging into the service leaked a copy of the “Google Stars” extension, as it was called at the time, while it was still being tested. And now, it seems Google has quietly launched the Stars interface for the “Chrome Bookmark Manager” extension on the Chrome Web store.
The actual process for creating bookmarks hasn’t changed. You can still click the little star icon in Chrome’s Omnibox when you’re on a page that you want to remember. Now, however, you can use a brand-new search feature to comb through your bookmarks for that elusive site that you know you’ve saved, but can’t seem to remember where it is.
Once you’ve signed into Chrome and enabled sync, the new extension adds a modern interface to the Bookmark Manager and automatically grabs images when you “star” a page from the URL bar. Clicking the star pulls up a preview of the bookmark and lets you choose a folder to assign it to. The extension also retroactively adds images and descriptions to your Folder bookmarks.Google has also ramped up search for your bookmarks, analyzing content and not just the snippets. Bookmark Manager also includes a new auto section that automatically sorts bookmarks by topic or domain.
As is standard with all of Google's web products, Bookmark Manager will sync across your devices, as well as offer collection-wide search that analyzes more than just domain name and page title, but content as well. As for new features, you're now able to add a small text note when you bookmark a site, maybe something specific you want to remember about why you're saving that page, or anything beyond the typical bookmark snippet. These notes will also help keep search results relevant.
The new extension includes social features, too, allowing users to share folders of favorite bookmarks with friends, for example, which is an option that recalls the social bookmarking services from Web 2.0’s heyday, like Delicious or Diigo, for example.
The users could also take advantage of the “Edit” feature which lets you check off a series of bookmarks in order to quickly move them into another folder or delete them. However, it has been spotted that the extension requires a more recent version of the Google Chrome browser. It may be possible that this Bookmark Manager is meant to be a public beta given that Google has yet to make an official announcement about its arrival.
How To Download
To download Chrome Bookmark Manager, go to https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bookmark-manager/gmlllbghnfkpflemihljekbapjopfjik link. It's completely free to download and use, but unfortunately it's limited to the Chrome web browser. Being that Google owns Chrome, it's highly unlikely that it will be released for other web browsers (sorry Firefox and IE users).
"Chrome Bookmarks and the Bookmarks Manager are now more powerful by incorporating the smarts of Google Search with a new modern UI," wrote Google in its description of Chrome Bookmark Manager.