I want to use this post to talk about a couple of cool tools Google offers for free that I find very useful.

The first is the Google Toolbar. Many of you may already use it but some may not. You can install it on both Firefox and IE and it has some cool features including a built in spellchecker so you can spell check any posts you make on boards or forms or whatever. It also has the Pagerank reader that tells you the PR of any site you are on. While the importance of Pagerank is shrinking it is still a good indicator of overall link popularity so people trying to do search engine optimization will find this useful. You can also use it to bookmark pages and then access those bookmarks from any computer in the world. You simply sign into your free Google account and you can see your bookmarks there.

The other cool tool is called Google Notebook. This tool lets you copy and past text and links from a page right to a notebook and save them for later. You simply select whatever you want to save then right click and copy, open up Google Notebook and paste it. If there were links in anything you selected they will get copied too. If you are using Firefox you can download the Notebook addon for Firefox that will let you copy information off of pages without even opening your Google account. Just selected the text, right click and in the menu click on “Note This (Google Notebook.) I do a lot of research for articles and such and in the past I have bookmarked sites with information I wanted to use later only to go back to them in a few weeks and find they have changed and the information is gone. With Notebook I can copy the information in a matter of seconds and I will have it whenever I need it. The coolest thing is that when you save some text from a site Notebook will automatically put link at the top of your saved text telling you where you got it from. This tool has saved me a ton of time and headaches. Hopefully you will find these simple to use, free tools helpful in your daily webmaster life.