Pocket has been organizing and saving your favorite articles and webpages from all over the Internet for a while now. It’s become very popular with a number of dedicated fans, and Pocket says its users have saved more than one billion digital clippings. Now, the company is adding Pocket Premium, a new paid subscription service with loads of new features, including permanent archive, automatic tagging, and a much better search function.
With Pocket Premium, you’ll still be able to do everything you used to do with the free version. You can save articles, photos, videos, and other media from the Web to read offline, but with the paid subscription, those articles will be available forever, even if they are deleted from the Internet. All of the clippings you save will be backed up in the Permanent Library so that nothing is ever lost. After a few years of using this service, you’ll undoubtedly have an interesting Internet time capsule.
If you’re one of the users who saves thousands of clippings to Pocket, the paid version’s new search and auto tagging functions will certainly be a huge help when you need to find that one video of a cat running into a screen door. Every item you save will be automatically tagged with the most logical keywords, so you’ll be able to find it later. The new search function works in concert with auto tagging, by allowing you to search using specific tags. With Pocket Premium, you can search by keyword, phrase, tag, author, or publication. The new search engine is full-text and it indexes every item you save, so in theory, it will make finding an elusive clipping that much easier.
All of these new features will only be available to users who are willing to pay $5 a month or $45 a year for Pocket Premium. You can sign up for the service on the website, but you will be able to use the new paid version on iOS or Android, as well as on the Web. At this point, it’s hard to say how many people will decide to pay for the new features, but the addition of a premium app certainly puts Pocket more on par with Evernote and other big-name archiving apps.