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Search Engine Review: Northern Light - A Research Powerhouse

© Paula Dragutsky

Northern Light has gone in a different direction from the other major search engines. It has broadened its search and research capabilities and left out such features as weather forecasts, maps, stock quotes, games, yellow and white page directories, etc.

Special Editions: The only service offered on Northern Light that is not search-oriented is Special Editions. Here you'll find thoughtfully selected and organized collections of websites about important current issues affecting business and politics. Some of the subjects covered are Year 2000 Computer Problem, Global Financial Crisis, and Electronic Commerce.

Special Collection - Useful Information For A Price

Northern Light's fast, effective search system accesses both the web and its own Special Collection, which contains articles and documents from 4,500 trade, scholarly and popular journals, magazines, newswires and databases.

If you select an item from the Special Collection, you're presented with a short summary of the document. To display the full-text of an item, you must pay a fee (usually ranging from $1.00-$4.00). The materials included in Northern Light's Special Collection are generally not available on the web (or can only be obtained for a fee).

Power Search Mode Recommended

Northern Light has two search modes, the basic search mode and Power Search. The basic search mode offers no search menus. There's only a search box.

I would recommend going directly to Power Search because you can opt to limit your search to web documents, excluding items from the Special Collection. This can be useful if you want to see results from the web before you look at documents from the fee-based Special Collection.

The Power Search mode includes menu boxes that let you easily restrict your search to words in the titles of documents and specify a date range for your search.

Using other menu options, you can limit your search to various types of sources (e.g. journals, non-profit websites, government websites, etc.), language and country of origin of your results, major subject area, and kinds of information (e.g. company information, job listings, press releases, questions and answers, etc.).

Search Tips

Northern Light supports the plus and minus signs for requiring or forbidding search words as well as the Boolean operators, AND, OR and NOT. Use quotation marks to designate a phrase.

You can stem or (or truncate) words using the asterisk to replace several letters (e.g. invest* to retrieve investor, investment, invested) and the percent sign to replace one letter. (Haag%n-Dazs - if you're not sure of the spelling). Northern Light automatically searches for both the singular and plural form of search words.

The copyright of the article Search Engine Review: Northern Light - A Research Powerhouse in Search Engines is owned by Paula Dragutsky. Permission to republish Search Engine Review: Northern Light - A Research Powerhouse in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.