Northern Light was once the name of a ship built in Boston. It had a new design for its day and won many races against other clipper ships. That name has been used again for a new venture in the Boston area, this time for an Internet search engine. There are already many search engines available throughout the Internet, with many functionalities. But Northern Light gets out by providing access to premium sources that are not found elsewhere on the Internet, and by linking results to search folders.

When you arrive to the main screen of Northern Light, you will find a blank line in which to enter your query, with the Search and Help/Hints buttons at its right. Underneath, you can choose to search in:

• All Sources: a combination of World-Wide Web and Special Collection sources.
• World-Wide Web: search on the WWW only
• Special Collection: information from journals, books, magazines, databases and newswires not available on any other search engine

By clicking on World-Wide Web, your search query will be limited to sources located on the Web. By typing scuba diving in the blank line, Northern Light found 55,727 items. The first 25 results are listed by order of relevancy, based on a percentage score. The results are displayed with their titles, their score, their category (ie. Directories & Lists, Articles & General info, etc.), an abstract, the type of site (ie. Commercial, Personal page, etc.), and the URL. At the bottom of the page, you can click on Next Page to see the next 25 results.

On the left hand side of the screen, you will a list of items: the search folders.

The Search Folders

Back to the results list, you would find, on the left hand side of the screen, a list of search folders. For our search on scuba diving, we have folders with names like Personal pages, www.scubadiving.com, Dolphins, etc. These folders are dynamically created based on your search query, regardless whether you search the Web, the Special Collection, or both at the same time. The folders are created based on four criterias:

• Subject (ie. scuba diving, data warehousing, desserts)
• Type (ie. press releases, articles, recipes)
• Source (ie. commercial Web sites, personal pages, magazines)
• Language (ie. English, French, Spanish)

The Special Collection

The Special Collection aims at combining Internet information with premium material. According to Northern Light, the Special Collection is made of 1 million articles from 1800 sources (journal, magazine, books, newswires, etc). Of course, there are no free lunches. If you want to view documents from the Special Collection, you have to pull out your credit card and pay a small fee, on a pay-per-view basis. Note that viewing the abstracts is free. If you are curious, you may view the list of publications included in the Special Collection either alphabetically or by subject.

For example, a search in the Special Collection with the phrase scuba diving found 796 items. By clicking on one of the items in the list, you would be linked to a citation like this one:

Title: Underrated Cancun emerges as prime scuba diving site.
Summary: Cancun, Mexico is a good place for tourists to try their hand at scuba diving, with its clear water, its reef system and its abundant marine life.
Source: Travel Weekly
Date: June 22 1995
Regular Price: $1.00
Subscriber's Price: Free (for the first 50 documents per month)
Document Size: Short (up to 2 pages)
Document ID: SL19970923030171193
Subject(s): Scuba diving--Management; Tourist industry--Planning
Citation Information: (v54 n49) Start Page: p18(1) ISSN: 0041-2082
Author(s): Budd, Jim
Document Type: Article

As you can see, it is a citation worthy of any database. The item Regular Price refers to the cost of getting that article, while Subscriber's Price refers to the price you pay if you choose to open an account with Northern Light. Should you wish to buy that document, you would simply have to click on Purchase Document.

Enhancing your search in Northern Light

Like with any other search engine, Northern Light recommends that you enter many words in your query in order to avoid excessive noise in your results. At a very basic level, you can type a simple phrase like:

ski resorts Alberta

• OR : this operator tells Northern Light to search for documents containing any of the words
• NOT : this operator indicates a word that must not be in the retrieved documents.
• " " : the quotation marks indicate that you want a match on the exact phrase.
• + : the plus sign is the equivalent of the boolean AND.

• vacation or holiday
• buffalo not city
• "ocean kayaking"
• "scuba diving" +gear
• recipe +"pasta sauce" not meat

• AltaVista = 149,144
• Hotbot = 74,070
• Northern Light = 42,748
• Infoseek = 35,748
• Excite = 23,313
• Webcrawler = 2,615