When I started browsing the internet during the mid 90s on Netscape, the Browser Bookmarks were like a god-send feature and probably the only way to collect and organise web URLs. Some prolific users of the internet would save full copies of the web page to the hard drive and then use AltaVista Discovery (the only desktop search program available for free at that time) to search through their local archives.

Fortunately, things are so much better now. Like the good old Netscape, the current browsers like Internet Explorer and Firefox still have no native features for saving web research but thanks to some third-party software, it was never so easy to take notes or save web clippings and other online information.

We review and compare some of the most amazing note taking tools to help you save anything that you see on the internet including complete web pages with images and links, documents, etc. And all the notes software mentioned here is free.

Microsoft OnFolio: Onfolio is the most powerful note taking application that can collect information from web pages as well as all other applications so you have a central repository of all content captured from websites, emails, documents including your TO DO lists.

With Onfolio, you can capture complete websites or single web pages in their entirety and save them to the hard drive. It can also download PDF files, pictures and Microsoft Office documents from the web into your local collection with a simple right click.

The only downside is that Onfolio stores all the content to your local hard drive and so you may not have access to your web research on another computer.

Clipmarks: Clipmarks is a pretty innovative online solution for saving web clips, images and even YouTube video. It works inside the browser (Firefox or IE) and lets you instantly capture any portion of a web page to your online ClipMarks account. You place the mouse cursor over the portion you want to save, Clipmarks will intelligently guess a logical border surrounding that snippet and a click will save that information.

A perfect solution for capturing just the portions of any web page that matter the most to you?it could be a video on YouTube, contact address of a friend, a quote on Wikipedia or anything else. Clipmark always includes a link to the original source so you always know the origin of your clippings.

ToRead and InstaPaper: There are situations when we come across an interesting web page but do not have the time to read it. So you either save the URLs of those sites to your Browser bookmarks or store them in del.icio.us with the tags ?follow? or ?toread?.

Now that involves some effort so you want to try toread or instapaper?very simple but useful services that let you remember web pages you have missed reading earlier.

With toread, you install a bookmark to your browser?click the link and a copy of the current web page in sent to your email address. In case of Instapaper, a link (not the content) of the web page is saved to your online instapaper account. Both services require you to make just one click without having to open any new window.

Google Notebook: If you want quick access to all your web research while on the move, Google Notebook is the perfect choice. This online web clipping tool from Google is available for IE, Firefox and they also have a version for mobile phones.

One of the most useful features in Google Notebook is the integration with Google Web search. You can save any search result to your online Google account by clicking the ?Note This? link that appears next to every search result on Google.com.

The sharing features in Google Notebook are again pretty impressive. You can publish notebooks as public web page or invite family members to work together on a particular notebook?a nice option if you want to do collaborative research for the upcoming vacation.

Amit Agarwal is a professional technology blogger at http://www.labnol.org