Following the northern star
Founded in 1995 in the basement of an old Cambridge, Mass., mill building, Northern Light Technology offers a search engine that has been adopted by many sites for the comprehensiveness of its searches and its ability to categorize the results.
In addition to the typical stack of results, Northern Light brings results to a user in category folders.
"These Custom Search Folders are unique to your search, rather than representing the search provider's own Web directory categories," said Brian Cooper in his guide, Searching the Internet.
By selecting the folder with the title that most closely reflects the subject in which you are interested, you are most likely to find the results you want, stripping away much of the chaff of search. Among the folders brought back by Northern Light after a search for "The business of America is business," is one on Calvin Coolidge, the originator of the quote. Other folders deal with economics, the Great Depression, John F. Kennedy and the New Testament. The latter includes articles on the relationship between business and the ministry and business and ethics.
The Northern Light index includes a special collections database of 6,000 licensed publications and 25 million pages of their content, on top of 310 million Web pages, a total that prompts it to advertise itself as "the largest search engine throughout 1999." The measure is tricky, given the proportions of the Web.
By comparison, AltaVista says it indexes 350 million pages and Google advertises that it searches more than 1.2 billion - without stating on its home page exactly how many it indexes. AltaVista spokespeople say its crawlers search more than 1 billion pages to come up with the ones it wishes to index.
Northern Light is building up its index consistently with quality Web crawling, said Joyce Ward, vice president of enterprise marketing. When it comes to searching an individual site, it not only matters what search engine has been implemented, but how thoroughly it sends crawlers to comb the site and related material on the Web, collecting the latest documents and information and adding it to the index, Ward said.
"We load new licensed content every 90 seconds," she said, and a total of 10 million documents a week, week after week.
Because Northern Light indexes every word in a document, rather than just the title or first few major references, it is possible to type in a paragraph of a student paper that looks uncomfortably familiar and see if it has been plagiarized, she said.
