Every day we consume more and more content on the web but usually, there’s not enough time to read everything we want. To solve this problem there are services that let us save links to read later, which is very helpful since they also help us make things organized and migrate content between different devices. A few months ago, Google released an interesting feature for saving image searches done on mobile and desktop, so you could get to your favorite images later, and now the search giant went full on throttle by expanding the platform for links as well and it is done via a Chrome extension that provides a quick save button.
After installing the “Save to Google” extension, you are good to go. To save a web page, just click the yellow button and it will be immediately saved to your Google account. There’s a button to add tags in order to make it easier for organizing the content later. When opening Google.com/save, you are greeted with all your saved links, displayed in cards containing the page title, the web address, and an image. Each link card gets a color, which seems to be randomly generated. There’s a search bar on the top and also a separate button for tags. By clicking on a tag, you will filter the links containing it. When hovering the mouse on a card you will see an option to select it, and after selecting one or more cards it is possible to delete them or add a tag in batch.
The service is pretty simple but also straightforward and easy to use. However, it is far from having the same set of features as Pocket or Evernote, just to name a few that do very well a similar job. One thing missing here is a mobile approach, since most users are usually on mobile when there’s time available for reading something. Pocket and Evernote, for example, have Chrome buttons but also mobile apps that allow you to sync content between devices even on different platforms, and save for offline reading. Since this is the first version of the service, we have to wait and see what Google has in the works for the service, but there’s a great potential, thanks to the rich ecosystem of apps and services offered by the company.