Googlemarks

Google recently blurred its Search History with its Personalized Search and added bookmarking into the mix.

From Googles Help:

Bookmarks are a set of links to your favorite websites. When you are browsing your Search History, just click the star next to one of the search results listed to create a bookmark for that website. Once you’ve starred a site, you can click the “Edit” link to add a label or notes for the site. You can then view the bookmarks for specific labels using the links on the left side of the page. The labels and notes you create for bookmarks are also searchable.

Michael Arrington’s take is that Google Targets Del.icio.us (but bookmarks are not public yet, and they require too many steps to be created, and del.icio.us’ commanding network effects could be hard to top as seen with Yahoo’s My Web 2.0, so they better acquire them), but there is no indicator that they are up to anything social here.

It’s more about turning one’s individual search-, click- and attention stream into a monadic Gmail inbox.

The way it works is actually pretty odd if you think in terms of bookmarking: you need to log in with your username and password, and then forget about it and search with Google for stuff. Whenever you click on a link, Google adds it to your Search History, but there is no way of explicitly bookmarking a resource you didn’t find it via Google. (It also won’t add a link to the list, if you opended it in a new window.)

Once you’re done, you can browse within your Search History very much the same way you would browse/process your Gmails: search for text within them, remove items, or flag items as bookmarks and associate them with labels/tags. I found it to be useful to clean up my Search History every once in a while, but this is a pretty powerful tool.