Northern Light has been around since the beginning of web search. For the last six years, however, Northern Light’s services have been reserved for enterprise customers. Recently, they launched a free business news search engine. Pandia has talked to CEO of Northern Light, David Seuss, to find out more about this and other Northern Light products.

What does the world of search look like from Northern Light’s point of view?

New free business news search engine

Pandia: Northern Light was one of the contenders in the search engine race way back. But the regular search engine has been closed since 2002 and for years the focus has been on enterprise search engines and research portals. Now you have a free, open business search engine out in beta. Why did you decide to make this move?

David Seuss: Northern Light’s free web search engine today is highly related to our enterprise search business, and in that it is actually very similar to the time period from before 2002 when our enterprise business grew out of our Web search business. Here is how it went:

In 1997 we launched a Web search engine optimized for professional researchers in a variety of ways including the inclusion of thousands of published business periodical sources for a subscription fee.

When enterprises saw that one could integrate and search licensed published sources, Northern Light was approached with the request to build private portals. We did this, and the enterprise business grew into such a large part of our revenue over time that we decided in 2002 to discontinue the free Web search engine and focus on the enterprise portals.

Today, Northern Light still operates these private, custom research portals for large organizations that have substantial strategic and product research activities. We refer to this product line as SinglePoint™, a single point of access for all a company’s research content.

We are pretty much the same company today as we were from the beginning, developing search technology optimized for searching published documents and substantive research reports, and providing unique solutions emphasizing content integration from diverse sources for research portals for professional users.

Our free search engine on the Web, NLSearch.com, showcases our abilities to integrate diverse sources, index, analyze, and extract business meaning. In this way, it is just like the Northern Light Web search engine you ask about that we had before.

We hope it will be a great lead producer, just like our previous Web search engine was, and be an impactful PR campaign that will attract coverage to Northern Light from industry leading journalists like Pandia Search Engine News. (It seems to be working!)

Also, we license the Web news feed to our enterprise clients, so there is a robust business model for NLSearch.com, just one that is not apparent to the ordinary end-user that is not an employee of one of our enterprise clients.

SinglePoint: Customized business research

Pandia: What does SinglePoint offer for those who like NLSearch and want to pay for a customized, specialized service?

David Seuss:Northern Light SinglePoint is a custom, hosted, turnkey business research portal solution. A typical SinglePoint portal has 12 external licensed research subscriptions from content suppliers like Gartner, Forrester, and IDC, as well as a business news feed and one or more internal primary research repositories.

SinglePoint provides content integration, search technology, text analytics (MI Analyst), enterprise 2.0 collaboration, user interface, search alerts, document and user authentication, administration system, and hosting. The core advantages of SinglePoint are being able to search all content sources simultaneously with easy click through access to documents for authorized users.

A salient differentiator of Northern Light is that we are a technology services provider in addition to being a technology developer. Northern Light builds the application, establishes the content flows from external and internal sources, deploys and operates the user interface and supporting applications.

We host and operate the portal, aggregating the content as it is published, building the database index daily, hourly, or more often using the new material produced by all the content providers.

We provide the network and hardware, serving the users’ search queries, operating the user account and authentication systems, delivering the documents to authenticated users, executing Search Alerts with each update to the index, providing all application maintenance and enhancements, and resolving content delivery problems that occur not infrequently when working with third parties who are experts at authoring important new content but not at electronic publishing. (If that is a run-on sentence, it is because we do so much.)

The strengths of NLSearch

Pandia: There are lots of options out there for people looking for business intelligence. What makes Northern Light Search stand out?

David Seuss:Let’s be clear: NLSearch.com is an excellent business news research tool, but by itself it’s not a comprehensive market intelligence resource — that’s what SinglePoint is. As a business news research offering, NLsearch stands out because:

(a) it offers business and industry news from thousands of business news sources, including leading business publications and hand-selected industry authority blogs, and

(b) provides users powerful analytical tools to determine what information is contained in the documents on a search results list, such as companies, markets and technologies, suggests what business issues the documents address, assesses the tone of the documents, and directs the researcher to the documents that are most interesting based on their meaning rather than on their statistically-derived search relevance.

Before NLSearch, aggregations of high end content and text analytics have only been available as enterprise solutions for hundreds of thousands of dollars. We think these two features and the amazing low price point of “free” make it pretty nifty and we hope you agree.

Pandia: It’s been 6 years since the free Northern Light search engine closed, an eternity in Internet terms. How has your search technology developed? And how do you see Northern Light developing in the time to come?

Northern Light’s ethos

David Seuss: We developed our first search engine in 1996. Certainly the technology has been continuously evolving over that span, but one guiding principle has remained the same.

That is that searching published documents and research materials for professionally involved users requires a search engine that is optimized for that task. Search for strategic research is different than search for finding your friend’s video on YouTube.

Research portal search should be comfortable with really big, complex documents with rich metadata from multiple internal and external sources. Search applications should mirror and amplify the special qualities of each content set and give users easy means to make business sense from the content.

The future of search

All that said, we think the future of search falls into several areas, which nicely interact with one another.

• We have work going on in new content domains such as government data sources, deeper pharmaceutical content, and ever expanding Web business and industry news.
• We are keenly aware of the benefits of social computing for strategic research, and we have work going on with clients right now to see which our ideas for social computing based on enterprise search are actually good ones.
• Lastly, we believe that search engines have to evolve to have an in-depth understanding of the searched body of knowledge and associated ways of knowing. Northern Light intends to take meaning extraction to new and profound levels.