I have one primary complaint about Google — namely, that Google and the Google services that I use regularly didn’t exist when I was in college.

Google Notebook, in particular, would have come in very handy when I was researching papers online. Ah well, it’s here now, and it’s still really useful in my day to day work.

Basically, Google Notebook is a site for storing notes along with a Firefox extension to help make it really easy to do so. (I think they also support this relatively immature browser called “IE,” but that’s of little interest…)

After installing the extension, all you need to do is highlight some text on a Web page, right click on it, and select “Note this (Google Notebook).”

Opera has a similar function, but there are two things I like about Google’s Notebook vs. Opera and other browser/note-taking implementations. The first is that Google Notebook lets you save the clippings online so that you can get to them from anywhere. Since I work from multiple computers, this is a really good thing. I can take notes while I’m working at my main workstation, or when I’m watching a DVD in the living room, or when I’m in room listening to a CD.

The other thing I like about Google Notebook is the format. If I highlight and save some text with a URL in it, Google dutifully copies the whole schmear — not just the text. It also saves the URL and title for the originating page, so I’m not left wondering a few days later where I found a snippet of text.

Being Google, it should go without saying that the Notes are searchable — you can search your notes, or all public notebooks.

By default, the Notebooks are private, though you can opt to share them if you want. Since I’m saving notes taken from public Web pages, I’m not terribly concerned about the privacy implications of Google knowing that I’ve taken notes from this or that site. If I’m concerned about privacy, I save it offline. If I’m really concerned, I can GPG it, but that’s a whole different kettle of fish.

One thing I’m curious about is the storage aspect, what the upper limit on Notes will be — whether Google is going to have any specific limit, and so forth.

I’d also like to see a way to back up Notes — the same way you can back up del.icio.us bookmarks or download mail from Gmail. I suspect that someone will have worked out a way to do this pretty shortly.