In case you haven’t noticed it yet, there have been some slight changes in some Google products including Search and Bookmarks. To begin with, Google added a small feature in the up right corner at their homepage from where you can choose to configure your Search settings and your Google account settings.

Clicking on the “Seach settings” takes you to the Preferences page from where you may change some cool things concerning the way your Google results may appear by altering SafeSearch filtering, the number of results per page, etc. However my favorite part is the Subscribed Links at the bottom of that page.

When you subscribe to some of these links you customize Google search to show special results from sources of your choice. For example if you search for “man grep” after subscribing to “Unix Manpages” you will get this as a result.

As you may see, somewhere in the first few results you will see a result coming from your selected subscribed links. In this specific example we get to see a very short explanation of the linux command “grep”. Apart from that you may notice the “iGoogle” link replaced by “Web Hostory” and the gbar – the blue bar in the results page that includes the “Show Options” link – that has shifted to left following the ads shifting which occurred a few days ago.

Moreover, Google Bookmarks and Web History have now merged providing a more complete bookmarking product. Google Bookmarks which almost seemed abandoned by Google now gets a little more attention. This merged product provides you a complete list of your web history splitted into categories such as Web, Images, News, Maps and Blogs. If you look lower you will see Trends, where you may see a list of your top searches, a look at your search activity, and other interesting tidbits. You will also see Interesting Items, where you may see Recent top queries and web pages related to your searches. And finally, at the bottom of that navigation menu you will see your good old Bookmarks.

I would love to see Google Bookmarks getting even better, more social and more beautiful.