[WEB4LIB] Northern Light To Stop Free Publicly Available Search Engine

[Richard Wiggins]

As a business decision, what Northern Light has done may make perfect sense.  There is no money to be made in free Web search services, not when there's Google and all the other contenders, and the advertising market is so depressed.

But the manner in which this decision was promulgated is, frankly, highly disappointing:

-- Word on this bombshell got out yesterday.  One of the premier Web search engines will no longer be in service as of January 16.  That's barely more than ONE WEEK of notice!  Would it have really cost the company any significant cash to maintain the service as is for a few months -- or at least 30 days?

-- There should be huge banner ads and red flags on the northernlight.com site right now emphasizing this news.  There aren't.  I can't even find an archive of the press release.  They toss the bomb on a newswire, and don't bother telling real customers on the Northern Light site itself?!?

NL has always marketed itself as the researcher's engine.  How many libraries have given instruction on how to exploit NL?  How many have NL listed as a favored engine?  (Google counts 27,000 links to NL).  How many users have followed advice and bookmarked NL?

Obviously one cannot complain too much when a company decides it cannot afford a free service, but you have to ask why the retrenchment had to be done with so little notice. The impression is left that this was a move of desperation, not careful business realignment.  I would not want to be a NL sales rep marketing for-fee services to a library after this move.

I say this as one of NL's biggest fans, having written one of the first (glowing) articles on them, and having had the privilege of meeting their highly-talented principals in better days....

It is beginning to seem as if besides superior algorithms and uncluttered interface, one of Google's strongest points is its mere stability.  Let's hope they really do have a business model that sustains them.

/rich


On Tue, 08 January 2002, "gary price" wrote:

> 
> Good Morning From D.C.
> 
> Another crawled database is set to disappear from public view. ):
> 
> Word this A.M. that Northern Light will stop making their free web search engine available to the public on January 16th. The
> NL Special Collection material (pay-per-view) articles will still be available to the public.
> 
> A Bit of Good News
> ------------------------
> NL's current news search (56 newswires) and search alerts will continue to be publicly available for free according to a NL
> spokesperson.
> 
> 
> >From the news release,
> http://www.businesswire.com/cgi-bin/f_headline.cgi?day0/220082145
> or
> http://library.northernlight.com/FB20020108420000192.html
> 
> "As of January 16, 2002, the company will no longer be providing free Web search capabilities to the general public. Northern
> Light's Special Collection(TM), an online business library of over 70 million pages of full-text, authoritative content from
> more than 7,100 sources, will continue to be offered to enterprise customers and to the public from Northern Light's Web site.
> Additionally, the company will offer Web searching to enterprise customers. Northern Light will continue to maintain and
> update its index of more than 350 million Web pages to provide enterprise customers with search of the Web using Northern
> Light's patented classification technology, and will continue offering custom Web searching for enterprise customers."
> 
> 
> cheers,
> gary
> 
> Looking for More News, New Sites, Search Tips?
> Visit The Virtual Acquisition Shelf and News Desk
> http://resourceshelf.blogspot.com
> 
> Gary D. Price, MLIS
> Librarian
> Gary Price Library Research and Internet Consulting
> gprice at gwu.edu

Richard Wiggins
Writing, Speaking, and Consulting on Internet Topics
rich at richardwiggins.com       www.richardwiggins.com