Search Engine Reviews: Northern Light Revisited

When I reviewed Northern Light almost exactly a year ago, I called it a research powerhouse - particularly for business research. Over the past year, Northern Light has continued on this path, adding a group of extremely valuable, complementary search services aimed at the business researcher.

To illustrate the breadth of information you can get at Northern Light, I'm going to follow a fictional researcher named Sheldon Holmes (possibly a distant relation of the great detective) as he gathers material for a report on the herbal tea market. (This is not meant to illustrate a thorough or exemplary search - it's basically a sampling of the type of information you can find.)

Search of All Northern Light Sources

Holmes starts with a search of all sources (both the web and Northern Light's Special Collection). The Special Collection is a fee-per-article database of approximately 6,200 sources containing over 16 million individual, full-text documents. Most are journal articles, costing $1.00-4.00 per article.

He begins his search by entering

"herbal tea" "herbal teas"

in the Simple Search search box and unhappily observes that most of the resulting items seem to be the web sites of retailers who are selling herbal teas. However, some of the Special Collection articles retrieved from retailing and tea specialty magazines, although a little dated, could be valuable to him. Holmes, a prudent fellow, decides to search other Northern Light services before he lays out any cash.

Business Search - a Search Form Tailored to Business Research

Holmes next goes to Northern Light's Business Search which offers a detailed search form that allows for narrowing a search by industry, type of source and date. He does a web search entering the same two phrases, but limits his search to the Food and Beverage , and Pharmaceuticals and Cosmetics industries. This again results in mostly retailers, which is not what he is after.

He repeats the same search choosing to access only Special Business Sources (business-related journals from the Special Collection). This results in some of the same pertinent articles he retrieved earlier in his search of all sources.

Holmes now decides to limit his search to specific kinds of documents, choosing Industry Overviews, Market Research (pages) and Find/SVP tables. Using the identical search phrases, he retrieves a list of hundreds of individual pages from market research reports, mainly from FIND SVP and MarkIntel Market Research.

Each page that is listed includes a brief description. There's a fee of approximately $20.00 to see the whole page.

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