Closing Google Bookmarks, interacting with the Maps favorites list

After 16 years of service, Google is about to shut down a little-known service. On September 30, 2021, “Google Favorites” will be closed to all users.

The announcement was fairly low-key, but as it was Point this week, a banner now appears on Google Bookmarks explaining that the service “will no longer be supported” later this year. Google will cut access after September 30, 2021.

After September 30, 2021, Google Bookmarks will no longer be supported. To save your favorites, click on “Export favorites”.

This isn’t much of a surprise, as bookmarks are a service that many Google users probably never even interact with. The service has been around for 16 years at this point, and despite the name, has nothing to do with bookmarks saved in Google Chrome. The service was used by some third-party apps and as a cross-device bookmarking tool by some.

Although bookmarks are not a widely used service by most people, closing it down strength have an effect on a much larger service. We noted that “featured” locations in Google Maps are kept in Google Bookmarks and, as far as we can tell, these two services are always in sync. This means that “featured” locations may end up being deleted when October 1 rolls around.

We reached out to Google for clarification on this, but there are some simple fixes here. On the one hand, you can easily change the list in which Maps saves these locations, only the “Starred” list syncs with bookmarks. Alternatively, you can go to google.com/bookmarks and click “Export Bookmarks” to get a copy of your data.

This article will be updated when Google provides clarification on the shutdown.