Google Notebook = End Of Research Headaches

I really don’t know how new Google Notebook is, because officially the press release states May 2006, but I’ve not heard of it till now (nor have I heard of anyone discussing it).

What’s so great about it, comes about especially when doing research. When I travel or do research on a product or just general research for a paper, I usually end up creating a bookmark folder and dumping everything inside, and then when I need to consolidate my information I have to open up all the bookmarks again and find the relevant part. Either that or I cut and paste everything to one big Microsoft Word document, but then it’s not universally accessible (ie if I make note of travel places, unless I carry that document around, it’s useless outside of my desktop).

The solution? Google Notebook. It puts everything on one page, and you can even create sub-sections to find the exact things you want. I posted an image below for my exchange research, you can see that even though the entire sheet is called “Exchange”, I can separate them by schools (or whatever criteria I want), and easily see where different sections begin and end later. Of course, I can Google search the whole document as well. Can’t recommend this enough.

Click for full view

 

I think the best thing about this Google product, is that it’s instantly relevant. How many times have you downloaded something and it takes too long to fiddle around with and it gets uninstalled? Happened to me for Google Desktop. In fact I recently re-downloaded it after a year to see if it got better. Nope. I think they need to get their Desktop product team to learn a thing or two from their Notebook team. Not in terms of design, but in communicating what the product does better. The “Take A Tour” feature for Notebook is definitely far superior to that of Desktop.

Follow Up On Google/Wikipedia Ban

There’s another post over at Marketing Pilgrim touching on the same article I posted about yesterday (original article here).

I think Marketing Pilgrim says the same thing as Seth Godin, in that obviously Googling something for hard facts is normal, but Googling for critical thinking is just going to fail. If people use multiple Google/Wiki sources to pool together their essay/paper and help structure it, it shouldn’t be a problem. But just taking the first search result from Google and repeating that definitely isn’t a good idea.

Can Google Be Your Friend If It’s Banned?

Search Engine Journal, a site I started reading regularly when doing my Google research, posts an interesting article about a Professor in Brighton that has banned Google in favour of traditional research like hardcopy journals. She says “Google is filling, but it does not necessarily offer nutritional content.”

This actually echoes something posted by Seth Godin in October, called The Wikipedia Gap, reacting to a similar incident where Wikipedia was apparently banned in research.

Note that in Godin’s post, he doesn’t claim that Wikipedia is a credible source of information (indeed, I’d never use that as a formal annotation), but it does provide good groundwork for knowing and appreciating the subject, before heading off to “serious” research.

I do wonder what would happen if this came to SMU.