On Tuesday, Google quietly introduced a Chrome browser extension called "Save to Google." The extension lets people save webpages to google.com/save, a site previously reserved for saving Google Image search results from mobile devices.

At first glance, Save to Google looks similar to browser extensions like Pocket or Readability, which allow users to save articles from the web and read them later. How is it different? First, Save to Google lacks a major feature of these read-it-later extensions, which strip away CSS and HTML formatting to present clean, plain-text articles that users can access on websites like Pocket and Readability. Save to Google doesn't work like this. Instead, it effectively turns google.com/save into a dressed-up bookmarks folder, where your "saved webpages" are just bookmarked links with header-photos.

Save to Google does offer some more features; for example, it lets you tag and add notes to saved webpages. To me, this makes Save to Google feel more like a stripped-down Evernote Web Clipper, and google.com/save a very basic version of Evernote.

It effectively turns google.com/save into a dressed-up bookmarks folder

Save to Google (and google.com/save) could be seen more as a research tool, than a read-it-later extension. And as a research tool, Save to Google offers a much simpler option than Evernote and its Web Clipper. I like that simplicity, and I've often felt that all of the features on the Evernote platform can become too overwhelming at times. (This is primarily why, nearly a year ago, I stopped using Evernote in favor of Google Keep for note taking.) For lightweight research, where you want to collect webpages in one place and take some quick notes on them, Save to Google looks to me like a seamless, easy-to-use option.