Google Bookmarks now includes an experimental feature (for English users) called Lists for privately saving links in buckets, sharing them with friends or publicly publishing them to the web. Coupled with the recent addition of stars in search, Google Bookmarks — an oft-ignored product — is a lot more useful.

Lists introduce the notion of social bookmarking to the Google service, which was previously a private bookmarking utility. There’s also an array of features — like list comments, in-line YouTube and content previews, recommended links and location features — included with lists.

After you navigate to Google Bookmarks you can either spontaneously create new lists from the left-hand menu or add them on-the-fly by ticking desired links and clicking the “Copy to list” button and selecting “Create new list.” What’s especially interesting is that if Google detects local links in your lists it will automatically provide a map for context. Google can also suggest links related to those collected in your lists via algorithmic analysis.

In terms of use cases, one that becomes immediately apparent is for those of us who frequently search for the same types of queries. During your typical Google searches, if you remember to use the star feature you can then return to Google Bookmarks to organize those starred results — which are automatically saved as bookmarks — into lists. For writers, researchers, and other hyper-searchers, lists in Google Bookmarks could prove to be a huge timesaver.

You can watch a tutorial around the new Lists feature below, or check out a collection of helpful information on Google Bookmarks Lists in this public list created by Google.