I have been thinking a lot lately about saving, tagging, storing and retrieving web information and research. And, while I use a number of different tools to to meet these needs, I just discovered a new one with a different wrinkle  – a desktop application that saves and stores your browsing history in the form of screen shots and searchable text. Hooeey Webprint (link here) is a free beta tool that works in the background to save and store the sites you visit. Every web page is captured in real time as a screenshot and as searchable full text, archived on your own computer. Store, search, tag and share web pages that you visit and they stay in Hooeey even if you delete or erase your browsing history.

The original Hooeey service allowed recall of past browsed pages and a central place to store links, much like any run of the mill bookmarking tool. Hooeey Webprint is definitely different – creating a firmer repository of web information which you can organize and search in a very customized way, independent of your browsing experience. Hooeey webprint also can store the user’s web library on a number of different storage services such as Google Docs, Zoho, Amazon S3 and of course, on Hooeey webprint’s own cloud.

There is added functionality if you pay. Hooeey’s tiered offerings breakdown as follows:

Even the free service has something to offer, particularly if you tend to do most of your browsing on a single computer. But even the paid version might be worth the money to a heavy-duty web researcher. Think about this: your virtual research assistant unobtrusively hanging by your elbow, marking down every web page as you browse, without you having to be interrupted to fill in bookmarking and tagging information, accessible from every computer you use. Might be the death of the legal pad after all.