March 29, 2008
A New Northern Light
Northern Light Readies New Free Business Search Engine by Paula J. Hane, Newsbreaks (Mar 27)
Here is truly exciting news for business researchers -- Northern Light, which has been operating mainly as a for-fee business research service, is going to become free. Northern Light was much loved by researchers in the late 1990s for its early leadership in organizing search results into folders and orientation to business information. For various reasons it closed its public Web search engine and specialized in enterprise search needs.
Beginning in April, Northern Light will be available at nlsearch.com as a business search engine. Newsbreaks has the full story.
Paula Hane describes the range of content, the use of "meaning extraction", and addition of social search features.
"In addition to searching the best of the web’s business news sources and blogs, the new Northern Light Search now provides text analytics and "meaning extraction" capabilities from Northern Light’s MI Analyst application, formerly only available to the company’s enterprise clients. It also offers some collaborative social computing features, such as Market Intelligence Wikis."
"Northern Light Search is open for free to all users. Registration is only required to take advantage of the advanced functionality, such as Saved Searches and Alerts, Expert Searches, contributing to the Market Intelligence Wikis, and saving user preferences. Seuss says the free search engine serves as an open and freely available presentation of the company’s capabilities for potential enterprise customers. "And, if a lot of people use it, we can sell ads," he says."
Posted by Gwen at March 29, 2008 03:42 PM