Northern Light is Back, for Business at Least

Remember Northern Light with its side folders and the combination of a Web search engine with commercial articles? It's back, in part. With some bad ownership changes, the public Web search engine was retired in 2002. Bought back by some of the original owners, it moved forward as a fee-based service only. Today, they announced their return with public access to their Business Research Engine. "Search full-text articles from 1,400 trade journals and 22,000 business websites. A total of over 100 million pages of business research content."

Compared to the size of the Web-wide search engines, this 100 million pages is a small subset, yet it is targeted at business-related pages and sites. For the business searcher, it may prove to be a compelling approach. Beyond the free Business Web content, other databases include Journals, Latest News, Business News Archive, and White Papers. Access to results from the Business Web and white papers databases is free, while the news and trade journals databases require an account ($4.95/day or $9.95/month).