You Can Hate (Block) But No Longer Love (Star) Google’s Search Results

Google has disabled the ability to star search results from within the Google search results page.

As you may remember, Google replaced SearchWiki with starring results back in March 2010, about 16-months after Google launched SearchWiki. Now that Google has re-introduced a way to block sites in Google, Google has determined you no longer need to star search results from the search results page.

This does not mean that you can no longer see stars in your Google search results. It does however mean that you will no longer be able to star results directly from the search results. Instead, you now need to go Google Bookmarks and add a bookmark there for a star to show up in your search results.

Here is a picture of Search Engine Land as a starred result in Google’s search results. The only reason it shows a star is because I manually added it to my Google Bookmarks.

As stated at Google Operating System and Search Engine Roundtable, a Google employee named Laudy explained in two Google Web Search Help threads that the starring results were removed but does not explain why.

Postscript: A Google spokesperson sent us a statement:

Results you’ve already starred or bookmarked will continue to appear with stars in your search results. You can also still bookmark pages using the Google Toolbar or by visiting google.com/bookmarks. However, we are in the process of updating our bookmarking features so the ability to star new sites on the results page is currently unavailable.

Related Stories:

• New: Google Lets You Block Any Site From Search Results
• Google Kills SearchWiki, Replaces It With Starred Results
• Google SearchWiki Launches, Lets You Build Your Own Search Results Page
• Google SearchWiki 101: An Illustrated Guide
• Google SearchWiki To Get Off Button, Might Get Used As Ranking Signal
• Blekko Bans Content Farms From Its Index
• Demand Media & Being “The Best Click” On Google

About The Author

Barry Schwartz

Barry Schwartz a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land and a member of the programming team for SMX events. He owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry can be followed on Twitter here.