Northern Light closes public search engine

Northern Light will no longer uphold the free version of its search engine.

(Jan 8 2002) Northern Light has always been the odd man out in the search engine family (although "family" is probably a too strong word). While its siblings have struggled to charm the general public, NL has focused on Internet search professional, illustrated by its strong support for advanced Boolean search terms.

In a surprise move Northern Light has now decided to focus exclusively on the commercial aspect of its services, abandoning the public search engine.

In its press release it says it is "refining its business to focus more exclusively on the needs of enterprise customers."

The main reason seems to be that the maintenance of the public search site has become too costly.

This is of course the case for all the search portals. Unlike AltaVista, Yahoo!, the new Excite and others, however, Northern Light has decided not to go for paid search results in order to finance the public site.

Northern Light's Special Collection, the online business library of over 70 million pages of full-text, authoritative content from more than 7,100 sources, will continue to be offered its public Web site, but you will normally have to pay to read the articles.

Gary Price reports that NL's current news search (56 newswires) and search alerts will continue to be publicly available for free.

The Northern Light search engine is not dead, however. Northern Light will continue to maintain and update its index of more than 350 million Web pages for its paying enterprise customers.

"Over the past year, Northern Light has seen booming demand for search, classification, taxonomy, and content solutions from our enterprise customers and marketing partners. Indeed, our sales bookings in the quarter ending in December 2001 were double the previous quarter," says David Seuss, CEO of Northern Light Technology.

"Meanwhile, the business model for free, advertising-supported, public Web search has not been developing for us. We made a strategic decision to discontinue free public access to our Web search in order to focus resources and investment on those parts of our business that are growing rapidly."

Northern Light homepage

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