After 15 years, it’s the end of the line for Google Bookmarks

Google has a bad habit of scrapping its services. Other than its successful search engine, Google Maps and Gmail, there’s a serious graveyard of cancelled initiatives. Just think of the Google+ social network being shut down in 2019 or Google Play Music having its epitaph written in 2020. The list is so long that a site called KilledByGoogle was launched to keep a record of all the victims. Now, Google Bookmarks is the latest service to be sent to the slaughterhouse. Available since October 10, 2005, this cloud-based online service allowed users to bookmark pages as favourites and then assign tags or notes to them. The feature is somewhat redundant, as it’s already included in browsers by default. However, Google Bookmarks wasn’t integrated into Chrome, which partially explains the lack of interest from users. In any case, the death of Google Bookmarks wasn’t unexpected—the service hasn’t been updated for several months and its ultimate demise has been scheduled for September 30, 2021. Users who want to keep their favourites will be able to use a feature to export data to an equivalent service. As a side note, the end of Google Bookmarks also foreshadows problems for Google Maps, as both services are synchronized: the places saved in the navigation application are also stored in Bookmarks. However, the American giant provided some reassurance on that topic, stating that “Starred Locations in Google Maps aren’t going anywhere. All of your starred places remain intact, and you’ll still be able to save places to a list just like you always have.”