Google online research tool

Filed in archive Software on April 23, 2007

If you are like me I am finding it quite difficult in keeping up with the wide variety of services on offer from Google. Last night while I could not sleep at mid-night, I played around on my laptop (notebook if you really want to be pedantic, however, I need to distinguish the difference between the hardware I was using and the new service from Google.)

Have you heard of Google Notebook? Well go no further, and I will give you a potted idea of what Google Notebook is about.

Google Notebook is a little software tool that can be positioned in your web browser in the bottom right-hand corner (as shown in the picture above). It is a tool to keep a record of any research you might do online. Say for example you were researching "Competitors of netsuite Online Software". Then go search the Internet. When you find something interesting that you want to keep the reference simply mark the text you though very interesting on that site and click on the "Clip" button. The text you highlighted, and all headings to that page are kept along with keywords if the site.

To organize your information, you can keep more than one Google Notebook, and you can divide a particular notebook into sections. So when researching the competitors to Netsuite, you might want to create a new section of that Notebook one for each competitor. Then when you find information from various sites about that competitor you can easily categorize that information in its own section. Researching two ideas at the one time, create a new Google Notebook for that research as well.

When you want to use your research you have a number of options: open that research to other collaborators that you identify by email address, and those people in your collaborators list can add to your notebook, or slide all the research into a Google Document and start writing your report with all you quotes and notes handy. Or if you really are ready for others to see the research you can make a public web page available to any viewers, and as you create that page you can invite a list of viewers to come by and review what you have found in your research.