Google notebook is pretty good and i mostly use that. autosave, search, tagging. They don't develop it anymore apparently but it's still usable.
http://www.google.com/notebook
I used to use google notepad. But since google doesn't support it any more, I thought, it's a good idea to switch. I started using evernote after that. They make it very easy to import your existing entries from google notepad too.
