Northern Light Technologies

During the rise of Internet search engines, Terabase developed the award winning Northern Light Web Search Engine Northern Light Technologies* (acquired by divine, Inc. in 2001).

Northern Light was the first Web search engine that provided access to both general World Wide Web content and high-value paid content. By combining Web information with the authoritative sources of corporate information, Northern Light provided a “buy by the sip” information utility for corporate customers. These customers — typically business researchers or special librarians — were tasked with finding qualified information sources, were looking for solutions for corporate knowledge workers.

Terabase delivered core server technology for the Northern Light Web Search Engine by leveraging the Terabase®/SRF Search and Retrieval Facility in conjunction with highly reliable OpenVMS Alpha clusters. Terabase designed the database schema, provided all of the database loading and indexing and query software, and implemented classification and relevancy software satisfying Northern Light’s specific requirements. Northern Light crawled the Web, prepared all of the data for loading and operated the service — including managing the front-end servers, the document servers, and the creation of the categorization taxonomy.

At it’s peak, Northern Light encompassed over 400 million pages of Web Content with over 6 million high value paid articles. All information was continuously available on a large cluster system capable of handling a heavy load of query users.

In the screen image above, you can see the capabilities of the Northern Light Search Engine. Note first that the query results in a category tree on the left hand site that showed all of the available topics that were found in the selected records returned from the query. By selecting any one of these categories, the list of selected items would be changed to reflect the new set of records that were a member of that category — the resulting query would display a new list of categories that applied to that new search. The catch-all category “all others…”, shown at the bottom of the list, would provide those records whose category did not fall into any of the prior categories.

On the right-hand side, just under the search box, we can see that those items that are standard Web pages are marked with the “WWW” to the right of the abstract. If the selected item was from a qualified paid resource, the record would instead indicate that the paid content could be added to the shopping cart, thereby providing a way to purchase individual documents. The second record is a good example of a paid resource — in this case, the Business Wire PR network. Note that the full title of the document is listed, as well as a relevancy ranking, and a link to find more articles from the same source.

The Northern Light search Engine received a multitude of awards and garnered significant praise from leading industry magazines. Among those awards, were: PC Magazine Editor’s Choice in 1998, 1999and 2000; Forbes Magazine “Best of the Web” in 2000; and CIO Magazine’s 50-50 Web Business Award in 2000. a sampling of the awards and the commentary are shown below.