Mountain View, California — In an attempt to deliver more personalized search experience, Google today unleashed yet another way to give users a more novel feature — marking search results with cutesy, yellow star icons, called Google Stars, allowing them to mark their favorite or best query results or map location results to make sure they are prioritized during future searches.
Incidentally, Google search will now abandon the not-so-popular SearchWiki feature that launched at the end of 2008, which according to the Official Google blog did not received much appreciation by users especially since it changes the order of Google’s organic search results. Now the search giant is letting users “star” search results that they like, just like the star feature in other Google products like Gmail, Reader, and Google News.
If you are a Gmail, Google News or Google Reader user, then stars are far from being a new concept to you. The feature is very familiar, which allows users of its many applications starring messages, articles, favorite e-mails and blog posts that they like so that they can find them more easily later. For instance, if you receive an e-mail that requires you to take an action, you can star it so that — even if more e-mails push it off the front page of your inbox — you can locate it and any other urgent or important messages with one click.
Here is what the Google Blog explained about the new search stars feature:
“With stars, you can simply click the star marker on any search result or map and the next time you perform a search, that item will appear in a special list right at the top of your results when relevant,” the company explained. “That indicates that if you star the official websites for your favorite football teams, you might see those results right at the top of your next search for [nfl].”
Below is what the new “Starred results” feature looks like:
It is as good as bookmarking a page that does not exactly deserves space in your existing bookmarks list. That said, stars will merge with your Google Bookmarks and Google Toolbar so you can access all your starred links from either of those launch points if you so desire.
“The great thing about stars is that you do not have to keep track of them,” the company continues. “You do not even have to remember whether or not you starred something. Simply perform a search and you will automatically discover your starred items right when you need them. Stars sync with your Google Bookmarks and the Google Toolbar, so you can always view 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.”
Even though SearchWiki is being terminated, people who did use it would not be affected or lose any of their changes after the transition, the company says.
This almost seems like an apparent move for SERPs now that it is there, but it has not been present until now. Google said the new star features will be rolled out globally over the next few days. However, it will only function if you are signed in of course.