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Google Testing ‘Stars’, A New Read-it-Later Service to Make Bookmarking More Useful

Every web browser has Bookmarking feature but a very few of us actually use it and that could be the reason that Google is trying to make it more interesting and useful.

The search giant is experimenting with a new Chrome feature that would allow you to save any piece of content such as a web page, an image or an email. Google named the new service as ‘Google Stars’ and it appears to be in its very early stage. The feature will let users bookmark and save different items on the web and add them to folders. Once saved to a folder, the users will be able to share and review their favorite content later.

The new feature was first discovered by Florian Kiersch – a German student who enjoys fishing Google code. Google’s new read-it-later feature may be similar to the bookmarking feature that’s available in the Chrome right now. The new feature is currently being given to Google employees only for testing. The service will include its own extension to let users save links and will also sort those links into lists and categories automatically.

Kiersch writes – Google Stars was originally named as Google Collections, and it looks more beautiful than bookmarks. Users can already star web pages and emails from Chrome but if this feature ever executed, they can even expect to see the star on YouTube videos, Google+ pages, image search results, and even personal contacts.

According to the current source code, the new feature will make all bookmarks fully searchable. The stars will remain private until made public by users to share them. The search giant will automatically organize your stars, detect spam as well as dead pages, and can categorize the content into filters by discovering the patterns. There will be a bookmark library that will allow users to make notes on their bookmarks.

Images, videos and web pages are specifically mentioned in the source code but it may include nearly all of the Google services. It looks like Google is planning to cover all things under the head ‘Stars’ and the feature is expected to launch in June during Google’s I/O developer conference.  

Google Bringing Out Cleaner Search Results Page, removes Underlines

Google has rolled out certain changes to how it displays results on its search page – delicate but noticeable change.

When talking about the two big changes – first is the removal of lines from the search results and second is the introduction of a yellow label. This yellow label is called “Ad/Ads”, these modifications are to redesign the search pages and making them cleaner.

Have a look:

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Design lead for Google – Jon Wiley wrote on Google+ on Wednesday that, “We’ve expanded the size of search result titles and removed the underlines as well as evened out the height of lines. The move aims at improving readability and creating a look that is clean. We’ve also introduced our latest ad labels from mobile, to make multi-device experience more exciting.”

Web users started noticing the changes in the last two days, but officially confirmed by Jon Wiley on Thursday via Google+. The lines you are used to were adopted in the 1990s, being a part of web designing ideology. But in the last few years many sites have moved away from underlining links, to make their pages look cleaner.

Along with these changes, Google has also removed that light pink background you must have noticed at the top of the search page. The search giant has increased the font size for titles and it clearly means less character appears. The new layout will feature a dark gray color, rather than black.

Some users welcome the modifications but some didn’t. According to some users – the changes will definitely improve readability while others say it’s too blurry. They say that the font size is too bigger and the search giant also failed to use the full width of the screen.

The changes also looked different on different browsers and seem to be effective on Chrome as compared to Firefox.

Hope, the changes will not make it difficult for web users to use Google….