Come Back to Northern Light
Our recent discussions of mega-search engines reminded me of the message I received earlier this week from Northern Light. When I used to use it, Northern Light was a free service that pulled up news articles available on the web. I believe this was before Yahoo! News and Google News were prevelant. They then changed their business model, allowing for deep searching of the web plus consultant and other business reports. At that time a cost was added on. Well, the message reprinted below indicates they are changing their business model again–more features, and now just a token cost ($10 per month instead of $50). That is good news. I may just give them a whirl.
Our records indicate that you were a subscriber to the Northern Light Special Collection in prior years. We would like to invite you back to try us again. Our current product, the Business Research Engine, is similar to the old Special Collection but we have improved it a lot since you were a subscriber.
Here is what you get today when you subscribe:
- Market Intelligence Centers that provide the daily news, features articles, and in-depth reports on 20 industries.
- Weekly newsletter summarizing the views of high-end information technology analysts on timely issues in the IT industry, with data tables, charts, and links to resources.
- Searchable trade journal publications library with 1,400 full-text trade journals and 6 million pages of published business information not available from Web search engines like Google.
- Searchable business news wires with 70 newswires and 8,000 news stories per day updated every two minutes.
- Searchable Business Web database of 20,000 hand-selected websites containing 50 million pages of information relevant for business research (and excluding the distractions like e-retail sites and paid listings).
- Search Alerts that let you specify what you are interested in so that we can send you an email when new content that matches your criteria is added to the database.
Information Advisor just reviewed the Business Research Engine last month and had this summary:
“Business Research Engine is the best low-cost business search site we have seen.”
Note that when Information Advisor wrote that sentence in November, 2005, the price was $50.00 per month for a subscription. In December, we lowered that price to $9.95 per month. Click here to read the article on the Northern Light site.
To give us a try again, click on the link below:
Click here to sign up for the Northern Light Business Research Engine
You will have 30 days to cancel your subscription (with a simple click of one button) without cost or obligation if you decide it’s not for you after you sign up.
Thank you for your business in the past; all of us at Northern Light will work hard to earn your support again in the future.
Cordially,
C. David Seuss
CEO
Northern Light
Ah Connie, it was so much more than a news engine. Seven years back it was the cognoscenti’s engine, because it clustered the results according to the domain type from which the results had come.
So when faced with vague or ambiguous search terms, you could simply navigate down a branch structure that it assembled for each search on the fly.
Really powerful. No tricks on ranking algorithms since you saw everything clustered.
And then it went to become a fee-based service, and may have done great things, but seemed to fall behind the other engines.
There are still innovations from that period (like the early Dow Jones use of user feedback) that I think remain promising, but life goes on and we are all Google Monkeys now.