Build your own search engine

Clipmarks, maker of a browser extension that allows users to "clip" and store snippets of information from Web pages, today unveiled a new search tool that allows users to search through and access that clipped content.

While some other social bookmarking services let users search their customized Web links by a bookmark's title, tags or description, the new ClipSearch tool from Clipmarks allows searching within clipped content to locate matching key words, said Eric Goldstein, CEO of the New York-based company.

"Thus far, we've been about letting people organize and share clips with tags," he said. "Tags are very good to enable people to organize information, but tags are limited because you have to think about what to tag something and predict in the future what you will be thinking about when you want to find this. We go much further than tagging because we have the content that matters to you saved, so why not let you do a search based on the content?"

Goldstein, who is an attorney, created Clipmarks to provide a better way of saving portions of a Web page than having to cut and paste. Clipmarks allows people to clip text, images or video much like people have previously clipped a magazine or newspaper article. The extension provides a link to the source page of any clip. Users can automatically save their clips on clipmarks.com, post them to a blog or e-mail them, the company said. 

When users clip information, they can create a private library of content that now can be searched, or they can save clips publicly, Goldstein added. As a result, all Clipmarks users can better discover what other users are clipping about on any topic, the company said.

Clipmarks, which is free, works with the Firefox, Internet Explorer and Flock browsers.