This has been around as long as I can remember (as long as Google Notebook).

You see this if you are logged into your Google account and are using Google Notebook. A note with this search result is then saved at Google Notebook.

Yep, hate to say this, but it's nothing new. :)

You don't need to be logged into google note books. Turnign the firefox plugin off is useless to. It appears when you are logged into your "google account" (ie your email is up in the right)

I wonder how many people use this feature. As others said it is there for really long. Can we find one person who uses it?

I have been using it since its inception. It is very useful for research. Previously, when researching a subject (a product I am contemplating buying or a medical condition), I would search the net and book mark all of the sites. Problem is, these sites can change since the time I previously viewed them... they can disappear... the links can go invalid... etc, etc... The other option is to save the web page contents to my local machine. Problem is, over time, my machine can be full of unorganized files... and when I work on multiple machines, this information can be scattered everywhere.

Now, I just highlight the text/images/etc... and choose "note this" and don't have to worry about it. No matter which computer I login from, no matter where I am at, and no matter what happens to the original websites, I can gain instant access to the information I was previously researching.

You can technically also make some of your notebook information public, but this isn't something I have done.

To get an idea as to how many others may be using it, this search shows some notebooks that others have made public:

http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Awww.google.com%2Fnotebook%2Fpublic

Again, this would only represent a small subset of users, as these would be users who used Google Notebook AND set the specific notebook to be published publicly. I would suspect this to done by a small fraction of users.

I like windows notepad better.. It sticks around, its easier to copy and paste things to and I can save it to my computer easier. Besides that I can copy anything including code and save it into the correct format. I'm a notepad junky :)

Yeap, it's been around for a long time. I use it to remember sites I've visited - which I hope is what it's meant to be used for!

I'm having huge difficulty getting on the Google site. I cannot type www.google.com in my address box and get your site.