Northern Light Sells Out to CIA

Via NY Transfer News * All the News That Doesn't Fit

[Note: We are sorry to see that Northern Light, heretofore an
excellent research tool, has decided to sell out to the CIA. We
are cancelling our account at Northern Light and will no longer
permit Northern Light to access our websites, which they have
heavily indexed in the past.  -- NY Transfer News]

Daniel Brandt writes:

Another search engine bites the dust. In a different piece I read
today, Northern Light is closing down free public access to their
search engine on Jan 16, but will continue crawling the web (our
sites) so that web searches are still available to paying
customers. Kinda sucks....

source - http://boston.internet.com/news/article/0,1928,2001_950381,00.html

CIA Doesn't Spook Northern Light

By Roy Mark

In-Q-Tel, the Central Intelligence Agency's independent, non-profit
company funded by the U.S. Government, is teaming with Northern
Light Technology, of Cambridge, Mass., to develop an advanced
search system that will eliminate the need to manually sift through
countless documents in a variety of languages.

Financial terms were not disclosed.

The deal comes as Northern Light shifts its business model to focus
on corporate and government client rather than individual Web
searchers.

In the In-Q-Tel pact, a comprehensive, yet highly targeted, crawl
of Web sites identified by classification experts will be used to
create a database of all the relevant information while excluding
sites deemed to be of little value to an organization's goals.

Users will access the search service via keyword or Boolean syntax,
or a combination of search techniques. Northern Light's
multiple-factor relevance ranking algorithm will be used to order
the results and will be customized to meet specialized
requirements.

"This new application of Northern Light's technology can deliver
just the right information to our clients to save them from
extensive and time-consuming searches typically done manually,"
said Gilam Louie , In-Q-Tel's CEO. "It is a dramatic increase in
both efficiency and accuracy. Now users can quickly determine
what's relevant and what's not. Northern Light is providing a
valuable new application with tremendous potential to our
governmental clients."

Northern Light's enterprise search products include the Northern
Light Enterprise Search Engine, SinglePoint Custom Content
Integration service, and licensing of the Special Collection, an
online business research library of over 70 million pages of full
text documents from over 7,100 business and news sources.

"With the U.S government as its client, In-Q-Tel is a sophisticated
user of new information technologies for timely and precise
information. We are delighted that they have looked to Northern
Light to aggregate, search, and filter critical information. By
working with In-Q-Tel, we are running our technology in one of the
most challenging enterprise environments out there," said David
Seuss, Northern Light's CEO.

In-Q-Tel's principal objective is to identify and deliver
information technologies to support the CIA's intelligence
missions. It works with private and public companies in the U.S.
and around the globe. It also partners with universities,
established companies and labs. Founded in 1999, In-Q-Tel has
offices in Northern Virginia and Menlo Park, Calif.

[Mark writes for dc.internet.com, an internet.com site.]

 
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