Northern Light’s New Business Research Engine
Northern Light (yes, the Little Blue Folders pre-Google domination era Nothern Light) today announced that it is releasing a new version of its Business Research Engine which now opens the service to all users. Wow, Northern Light (pause), file this in the Blast From The Past Search Engine News category.
Here’s the press release on the new Business Research Engine:
C. David Seuss, CEO of Northern Light, said, “Ten years ago, Northern Light launched our first Web search engine with the idea that business professionals would prefer to search industry publications, business news, and the Web from one site using one user interface. Northern Light has been providing business search for a decade now. In 2002, the company’s then new owners discontinued free public access to the search engine and focused solely on enterprise users. When the employee group bought the company back in 2003, we immediately decided to return the free public access to our search engine as soon as we had the right product to offer. You cannot imagine how proud we are of this day when we are able to invite the public back. The Little Blue Folders are once again at your service!”
All users of the Business Research Engine can now browse the Market Intelligence Centers (MIC), access the featured reports and resources from the Web, and can use the Business Web(TM) search without limitations as well as our new white paper search. Users can search the full-text of trade journal and business news databases without limitation to see if there are interesting and relevant articles that meet their needs. A subscription or day pass is required to read articles from the journals and business news sources and to take advantage of our advanced functionality like Search Alerts, Public Alerts and user preferences.
There is no advertising on the site, no pop-ups, no paid inclusions, no text ads pretending to be search results. “The Northern Light Business Research Engine is a professional tool intended for professionals,” said Seuss.
Credit card subscriptions to access the premium content and features can take two forms: a monthly subscription for $9.95 or, a new option with this version, 24 hour day passes for $4.95. Subscribers have unlimited access to all content and features. There are also annual enterprise licenses available for $5,000 for up to 50 seats and $36,000 for an unlimited number of users.
Seuss observed, “From a functional perspective, the most significant change in the new version of the Business Research Engine is that much more editorial support is provided for the user. We have over 400 browseable topics and subscribable Search Alerts, and Market Intelligence Centers on 20 industries. These editorial features help the user make maximum use of the content and search technology. Our idea is to do as much of the work for the user as possible.”
Some highlights of new features are:
* Site Reorganized — reorganized design of the site to make it easier to
take advantage of the advanced features and to incorporate much more in
the way of editorial contribution to the user experience.
* Browse by Topic — browse over 400 editorially created and maintained
topic searches spanning every industry in each collection — Journals,
Business Web, and Business News. These topic searches are created and
maintained by Northern Light editors and are often more elaborate than
any alerts that you might create on your own.
* Toggle Your Search — automatically run your search in any collection
directly from the results page by clicking on the relevant collection in
the upper left hand corner. This makes it a snap to run the same
search on journals, news, archived news, the Business Web, or white
papers without having to reenter the search terms on a new form.
* Public Alerts — subscribe to receive email updates from any of these
topic searches. To see and subscribe to the Public Alerts, go to My
Alerts/Public Search Alerts, (the tab defaults to Public Search Alerts)
and open a folder or execute any of the topic searches.
* Set Preferences — customize your site by selecting a particular search
form or a particular MIC as your landing page when you enter the site.
Other user definable preferences include the ability to suppress the
display of specific Market Intelligence Centers on the Market
Intelligence tab, and the ability to turn off clustering by source in
the results list. To set your preferences go to My Account/My
Personalization.
* Review Your Account Details — display of account and billing
information specific to your account is now displayed in My Account/My
Payments.
* Administration Center — enterprise account administrators now have
extended access to sub-account details, usage reports, billing details
as well as online access to the Administrator’s Guide.In addition the already extensive content in the Business Research Engine has been expanded significantly:
* Market Intelligence Centers — browse through 20 Market Intelligence
Centers covering the landscape of industries, with our editors picking
the important stories of the day and finding substantive reports and
feature articles that provide analysis, commentary and perspective.
* Journals — 1.3 million articles from over 1,400 premium publications
that are mostly industry trade journals. This content is simply not
available from Web search engines. Several hundred new publications have
been added as part of the product upgrade.
* Business Web(TM) — there are now over 100 million pages from the
Business Web of over 22,000 websites of public companies, private
companies, venture funded companies, venture capital companies, trade
associations, trade journals, MBA programs, corporate law firms, and
agencies of the government that regulate business. Shopping and e-
retail, and consumer sites such as MySpace, are excluded from the
Business Web so that search results are from just that part of the Web
that business analysts and market researchers want. The Business Web has
been expanded to include thousands more sites, tens of millions of more
pages, and to ensure that the content crawled from sites is on target
for business research.
* News — 100,000 up-to-the-minute business news stories from over 70
newswires, updated every 2 minutes; or 3 million articles from archived
newspapers and newswires stretching back 3 years.
* White Papers — a brand new collection of over 5,000 company submitted
white papers, webcasts, case studies and other IT product information.
