Northern Light Announces First Business Search Engine With Integrated "Meaning Extraction" Capabilities

Northern Light Search breaks new ground in search industry by
identifying critical business issues in results list documents

CAMBRIDGE, MA, Apr. 16, 2008 - Northern Light (www.northernlight.com) today introduced the only free search engine of business news and industry authority blogs that also offers powerful, automated meaning extraction capabilities and collaborative social computing features.

Northern Light Search (http://www.nlsearch.com) instantly connects business researchers with relevant business and industry news from thousands of business news sources, leading business publications, and hand-selected industry authority blogs. Users can automatically analyze their results to extract meaning from the articles discovered in the search.

In the context of business-centric search, meaning extraction determines what information is contained in the documents on a search results list, such as companies, markets and technologies; suggests what business issues the documents address; assesses the tone of the documents; and directs the researcher to the documents that are most interesting based on their meaning rather than on their statistically-derived search relevance.

The social computing features included in Northern Light Search include a Market Intelligence Wiki and a series of "widgets" that leverage the search activity of the Northern Light Search community of business researchers. These search widgets include tag clouds of most popular search terms and lists of the most popular articles accessed by other business users. The Market Intelligence Wiki provides an overview of selected industries and business trends, with a detailed picture of market segments, issues, breaking news, companies, and government regulatory actions. Northern Light's internet librarians have seeded the wikis by scouring news and industry sources for authoritative news, analysis and commentary to create comprehensive, concise wiki sites for a dozen industries.

"Northern Light is defining the future for the automated analysis and discovery of business meaning from large stores of business-related content," C. David Seuss, Northern Light's CEO, said. "With Northern Light Search, researchers not only have a highly focused search tool tailored to business content that leverages the network of business researchers using it, they also have an automated assistant to help them identify key themes in articles and draw connections between companies, technologies and market trends - which can save many hours of analysis time and help researchers identify emerging business strategy issues much earlier than they might have otherwise."

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About Northern Light Search
Northern Light Search (http://www.nlsearch.com) lets users search, browse and analyze content, personalize the site, set search defaults, create and subscribe to alerts, and collaborate with other business researchers. Northern Light Search provides researchers with access to over a million articles and blog postings, and is updated continually with approximately 12,000 news articles and 2,000 posts each day. The service also features Market Intelligence Wikis (http://wiki.nlsearch.com), which provide an overview of industries and business trends, with a detailed picture of market segments, issues, companies, and government regulatory actions, and several widgets for collaborating with other business researchers using the system and which leverage the activity of the search community.

The integrated meaning extraction capability in Northern Light Search is enabled by Northern Light's MI Analyst™ application, which the company launched last May as an option to its SinglePoint™ hosted market research portal and content integration application for large enterprises. MI Analyst speeds and improves a researcher's ability to analyze articles, identifying the strategy issues and suggesting the business implications of the analyzed content. MI Analyst highlights threats and opportunities regarding products, market share, pricing, new technologies, marketing partnerships, and corporate strategy.

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About Northern Light
Northern Light has been providing strategic research portals, business research content, and search technology to global enterprises since 1996. During that time, Northern Light has built and deployed over 200 custom research portals and enterprise search applications for large enterprises. Northern Light's current clients include one or more of the top five companies in each major technology sector of the Fortune 1000, such as Cisco, Hewlett-Packard, SAP, Sprint, and Unisys. Headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with a development center in St. Petersburg, Russia, Northern Light Group LLC is a profitable, privately-held, self-funded company with more than 50 employees.