Google Collections renamed as ‘Google Saved’, may indicate greater commitment to the feature

I’m a big advocate of Google Collections – the company’s bookmarking system for user curated content across literally all of its services. In fact, I’ve recently talked about how you can use emoji to quickly identify your Collections and make them glanceable, and since I did this, I’ve been saving a lot more content to my account across Search, Maps, and literally everywhere else.

Now, as noticed by 9to5Google, Google is ditching the name ‘Collections’ and going with its original nomenclature of ‘Google Saved‘. My first reaction was to freak out because when Google starts renaming things, it means one of two things. First, they could be planning to ‘sunset’ the product or service, and this is essentially the tech giant holding an axe behind its back and smiling like it did with Stadia.

The second thing it could mean is that things you’ve ‘Saved’ on Google are now becoming so core to the user experience that there is now no need to separate it from the brand with a special word. This is the best thing it could mean, as it indicates Google’s increased and continued commitment to the feature. This is at least the one I hope it is!

The idea of curating your own ‘everything’ on Google across movies, tv shows, books, images, recipes, articles to read later, and well, literally everything else is one of the most appealing things that give me a personalized feelings in the ecosystem, and I certainly hope it doesn’t go away.

‘Google Saved’, or ‘Collections’ have been around since 2017, which is about six years ago, so anything could happen at this point. To be honest though, it would feel very strange to have a world full of information and no way to hold on to it in a form that feels custom to my needs and uses.

It’s one of the most genius additions to Google’s grand vision for the web, and I think it would be a terrible move to nix it. With that being said, again, I think we’re going in the other direction, but because it’s Google, I always feel like I’m walking on egg shells, and that’s unfortunate.