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Isn't Northern Light striking a deal with the CIA and shutting down its public search engine? or was that disinformation?

I also remember not too long ago another search engine, with a horribly long name. Northernlight or something like that. What were they thinking?

Northernlight can also be reached at nlsearch.com. Most comprehensive search engine on the web.

Northern Light strikes me as doing the best job of returning relevant results, going so far as to thoroughly categorize the results by topic. Also has a greater portion of the web indexed than any other engine. The downside is that there is a bit of lag time in adding new domains to the bot's indexing runs...

Google is pretty good at giving relevant results, but it misses a lot of sites. AltaVista is rather thorough, but not very good at relevancy ranking.

These observations are simply based upon my own experiences with these engines, so your mileage may vary. When performing intensive searches, I generally use all three, but I'll often start with Ask Jeeves, which is easily the best meta-search engine out there...

Btw, does anyone still use VMS in new applications anymore? and what other architectures does it run on?

OpenVMS runs today on the Alpha platform. New applications. Let's see, the Northern Light search engine runs on OpenVMS (not the front-end web servers, but the actual database). The Accuweather website is hosted by a VMS cluster running the OSU DECthreads webserver. Check out the OpenVMS website for more success stories. People think of OpenVMS as being dead, but it still brings in $4 billion in annual revenue for Compaq. The healthcare, semiconductor, and lotto businesses would gring to a halt without OpenVMS.

Nice concept and cute logo and all, but its database is woefully lacking. I did a couple of comparisions between it and Northern Light, AltaVista, HotBot, and Microsoft Search, and Google just couldn't hang. Now, if you're saying once they crawl more pages that it'll be the best, that's one thing, but right now it seems like a glorified Yahoo!, in that it's more likely to find the most popular sites, but come up empty on some detailed searches that the others can handle. Plus, it doesn't even have an "OR" operator, and I might've missed it, but I didn't see how I could search single domains. I'm not sure that this is even second-rate searching -- it definitely isn't first.

Why do I get the feeling that if the Google operators were Amiga advocates instead of Linux advocates, they wouldn't be getting all these swell reviews here at Slashdot? It's like the hoopla that goes one whenever someone actually comes out with a game for Linux --- no matter how inferior it is, or just plain bad, people rally around it to tell us how it's actually really really awesome. Anybody got a good term for this "Linux programmer welfare" phenomenon?

For the record, I prefer Northern Light, but still head to AltaVista first out of habit quite a bit --- by the time I remember that I had meant to go to NL, AV's already loaded. MS Search seemed pretty damn good at the queries I threw at it today --- I hadn't tried it out since it was in beta --- so I might have to play around with it some more and really push it. Hotbot's not bad, Excite has some ability, but its interface is just horrible; those are pretty much the only ones I bother to use anymore (although I might add MS Search).

Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com

I used to use Altavista as my main search engine, but after watching their web crawler being totally unable to handle the relative links on my site I've switched to Northern Lights