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The late-1990s early-20-oughts search engine "Northern Light" was exactly that (old screenshot image link ironically found on via Bing). It did just what you describe: "search providers (even paid *gasp*) who specialize in certain areas such as history, science, technology, news, etc", bundled into a singly search interface. There was both general purpose search that was free, and it also pulled in and offered premium results from topic-specialty paid providers. You could choose to search the "World Wide Web", or "Special Collections" (the paid part). Or "All Sources" to pull in both. If you had a paid account, you could see more than the excerpt on the "Special Collections" results, and choose which sources to use.

It was the dawn of the Dot-Com 1.0 bubble. Northern Light was our last best hope for that consolidated search. It failed.

At one point, during the Altavista dying-but-not-dead period, while Google was still a total newcomer, it was getting a lot of traction. But it got flanked by Google pretty quickly and sunk. It's now entirely a paid, sold for internal client companies' use, very different product with no public search engine at all. Product called "SinglePoint" and loaded with buzzword bingo in its description.

$2,500/year gets you a world-class search engine capable of searching up to 150,000 documents (more, if you go with a different license). Runs on a Linux box. Crawls not only web-crawable content, but ftp-accessible stuff and databases, too. I can and have customized it using perl. I love it.

Dave Baker
Using it at http://benefitslink.com/search/

If Google is my hands for the web, Clusty is going to be my eye. I can swipe my hand through water in a pond, or sandhills on the beach, and get an idea of what is out there on the web, *in the order of popularity* (because backlinking is so important).

I have no problem with this way Google works, I found backlinking to be tremendously useful when implementing a gigabyte-sized database on htdig, and Google "just works".

Clusty on the other hand works to reduce my information saturation, it will reduce the overload and make me feel better. It seems similar to NorthernLight which did clustering a long time ago, but I believe stopped their public engine and are now going after the enterprise (apparently successfully? They have a linux download too).

I may be biased as I am also very interested now in faceted metadata search engine design, and that seems to be what Clusty is doing. I can't tell if it is the same categories as dmoz.org (which Overture says they leverage), but it seems to work. For example I typed in Northern Light and it gave me the categories of Search Engine, Reviews, Aurora, and even Crude Oil. Crude Oil disappeared when I put quotation marks around the search terms, so I'm impressed, they've taken the trouble to match phrases.

I tried some nonsense words, and discovered connections I didn't know exist (mostly foreign language) - I tried splik, splike, and spli*. Try it yourself in google and clusty. Note Google gives you ten pages for splike while Clusty tells you the knowledge domains they fit into. No more clicking here and there in the google screen list to try and find less-popular links. And Clusty turned spli* into split. And click Details in clusty, and a little yellow information window descends, telling you the different sites (Reuters included) and how many hits from each.

Look at their clustering, it seems good and useful. I searched for something I'm interested in now, the search term was: free bioinformatics tutorials.

Clusty gives me categories like Genomics, some institutes, and the Bioinformatics FAQ. It lets me expand more than one section at a time, and the tiny "More" link at the bottom of the category list continually extends that list each time you click it. That's useful. This leads me to other categories including some C++ libraries, a Computational Biology heading, MDL Chime, and a bunch more. Wow! I haven't studied it much more yet, but I'd like to be able to show a lot of categories the first time (no More button clicking), have more screen width given to the categories column, and display the associations that made it pick certain categories. Also I'd like a yellow popup when I mouse over a category to show the next inner level's category list (at th e moment not too many levels it seems) the way Berkeley's Flamenco does. There is a legend below the category list with a line describing the plus mark as "Expand clusters", but I wanted this to expand all clusters and give me all the categories. About the way I just checked the Flamenco site.. I had to use Google. The first time I typed Flamenco into Clusty and it didn't give me any category called Search Engine, which surprised me. I selected cluster by URL instead of Topic, and when I clicked on berkeley.edu I got a Clusty Error which was reproduceable then but not later. I found it on Google by typing in Flamenco and Berkeley. To be fair, Google took me to an old page that redirected me to the right page. When I went back to Clusty and typde in Berkeley as well and searched by topic, it was fine and took me to the right server the first time. Also the berkeley.edu links worked okay then too, so I want to give them the benefit of the doubt.

About the tech, I'm not sure they went as far as they could even though it works well for me. I thought it seemed to be a faceted metadata engine in some ways because they show the number of hits in each section, th

Technology Review has a discussion of the coming rivals to Googol in this month's issue. One of them is an Australian outfit called Mooter which does some nifty clustering of results (somewhat familiar to those who remember Northern Light, once a web search engine, now a provider of enterprise search engines). They discuss several others, including efforts by Microsoft, but the general point is that Googol (and Yahoo and Alta Vista etc. before it) have shown the search business to be a very profitable area if you are the leader, so there are a lot of eager pretenders to the throne. Competition is good, web users will end up with better searching, whether from Googol or another provider.

It all reminds me of Northern Light, a search engine that tried to do this stuff many years ago. Looks like the company is still in business selling its SW, but no longer provides general web search.

I tried NL for a while as my primary engine. I liked the categorization feature, but it didn't cover enough of the web space or provide enough extra-topical intelligence about relevance to provide terribly useful results. I gave up on it and went back to (IIRC) Altavista.

The moral of the story, IMHO, is that it is not enough to provide advanced search features. Competitors also must provide all the basics that Google got right long ago.

Northern Light used to do this. It worked rather well, but in most cases writing better search criteria is less work. The reason why Google doesn't offer anything similar might be because Northern Light has patented their subject classification and taxonomy.

You're missing by far the biggest intranet vendors. Verity is the king of this market, and have been since the mid-90s. They get a lot of mileage out of their OEM sales; it sounds simpler to a company if they hear that they "already have Verity" within Documentum or Cold Fusion or whatever.

It'll be very interesting to see what they do with the Inktomi purchase. (They bought the productized search before Yahoo snarfed up the external services.) Inktomi is IMHO the best intranet search engine right now. (I believe Verity is dropping the Inktomi name and is calling the tool Ultraseek, which goes back to Inktomi's acquisition of Intelliseek.) The purchase gave Verity yet another leg up with enterprise search, it'll be interesting to see if they leverage the technology or if they see this more as a marketing move.

Google is obviously a big player here too. Don't need to evangelize to the /. crowd on that. However Gooogle still has a way to go in understanding how to tackle enterprise search.

Autonomy is another big player in the enterprise, though I am less familiar with their tools.

Other interesting enterprise search vendors include FAST, Isys, and Divine/Northern Light (yes they're still around). Teoma/Ask Jeeves could get there if they productize their search tool. Lots of interesting approaches there but nobody who's quite moved up into the first tier.

Anyway, it's a messy space even with all the consolidation above. I have no idea whether Ovation will keep up their enterprise sales effort or not; I suppose it depends on how profitable that part of the business is. Guess we'll find out...

Wouldn't you know it not 3 minutes after posting this, I point my browser to MacRumors, carrying the same story with a little different spin. They link over to Ars which in turn linked out to this article which says Apple is simply switching contractors. Perhaps /. was trolled or maybe Hemos was just gaslighting all the peecee zealots out here. Yeah, that's it, I was just gaslighting them...Yeah.

From Northern Light:

Source: AFX News - Asia
Date: 01/01/2003 20:22

Hon Hai replaces LG as sole supplier of Apple's iMac/eMac PCs - report

TAIPEI (AFX-ASIA) - Hon Hai Precision Industry Co Ltd (2317.TW) has replaced LG Electronics Co as the sole supplier of Apple Computer Inc's iMac/eMac desktop PCs, with 2003 shipments estimated at up to 1.0 mln units, the Economic Daily News reported without citing a source.

Hon Hai replaces LG as sole supplier of Apple's iMac/eMac PCs - report

TAIPEI (AFX-ASIA) - Hon Hai Precision Industry Co Ltd (2317.TW) has replaced LG Electronics Co as the sole supplier of Apple Computer Inc's iMac/eMac desktop PCs, with 2003 shipments estimated at up to 1.0 mln units, the Economic Daily News reported without citing a source. While Chunghwa Picture Tubes Ltd (2475.TW) will provide 17-inch monitors for the eMac machines, AU Optronics Corp (2409.TW) has been certified as a TFT-LCD panel supplier to Apple Computer, it said.

All it took was a few new ICBM's aimed in our general direction to convince me.

Remember the search engine called Northern Light that organised information into folders? When you searched you could click on topics on a toolbar to refine the search. I dont' know if it's still up but it would be at www.northernlight.com

Funny you should mention that, because AEP, the nation's largest producer of electricity did just that to a whole town in southern Ohio.

Doesn't Northern Light do this?

Probably because Google is profitable and someone that can be sued.

That may be true, but sooner or later they'll monopolize themselves into a full consumer revolt. Some people will just forget about landlines.

My Verizon bill just went up to $27 for local service with no long distance and no extra features. They just raised the Interstate Subscriber Line Charge from $3.50 to $5. My cellphone bill (ironically also w/ Verizon) is $40 with free long distance, voicemail, call waiting, and more night and weekend minutes than I'll ever use. If I ever stop procrastinating and get the cable modem, these guys are outta here!

The service the article describes appears to be the identical document-search business that Northern Light has been providing for quit awhile, on essentially the same business model. It was recently announced that Northern Light was leaving this business, and quite a few /. users expressed disappointent to see them go. All this news means is that this resource won't be lost. The standard Yahoo resources will still be available as well, without charge.

I just ran a quick test:

http://yhlib.northernlight.com/AbServ?p=research&c brecid=IX20020102010744647&.yid=E7ytyoHpsh9NUw--&. yts=20020123170434&.ys=fd6nrZJW4hpvuok4HT_OC_6HJvw -

To view the results will cost me: $180!!

wow! now that is better than a banner any day!

I'd love to pay, for instance to have instant access to all back articles from Dr Dobbs Journal or C/C++ Users Journal over the internet, as that is stuff that isn't available on the net today (both of them only publish a small number of their articles online). Today, if you want electronic access to back issues of those journals, you need to buy their CDs. Which is fine when you happen to have the CD around when you need it. But having access to it over the net would be so much more convenient.

Actually the documents are from buying out the Northern Light database, which is no longer free to the public either.

http://premium.search.yahoo.com/

I don't think Yahoo's going to reap any profits from this venture. After checking (haven't been there in a while) it looks like "pay for search" didn't turn out to be a very lucrative business model for NL.

Yesterday: ZeoSync Expects Data Compression Science To Improve Wireless

01/14/2002 Summary: A Florida-based scientific research company expects its technology, which compresses digital signals for transmission and storage, to enable wireless operators to deliver third-generation capabilities without deploying 3G infrastructure.

Experts question compression 'breakthrough' 1/10/02

Experts Question Compression Breakthrough Friday 11, 2002

Zariski surfaces:

Zariski surfaces by Piotr Blass ASIN: 8301019719 Zariski Surfaces and Differential Equations in Characteristic P-O Zar Piotr Blass, Jeffrey Lang 2nd Rev edition, Marcel Dekker; ISBN: 0824776372

ULAM Previous

Students

Blass, Piotr; 1977 Thesis: Zariski Surfaces.

Previously cited Archive.orgzeosync

Big Number Mathematics

The Real Life Problem

It takes days to download a large (say one movie) file today.

To increase communication speeds throughput over the Internet.

For doing the above a very high compression ratio in the tune of 1000:1 needs to be achieved.

The Possible Approach

In order to do solve the same we have approached the problem using: BIG NUMBER MATHEMATICS.

How Big is this Number ?

The number is in the range of 28,000,000,000

The base of this number system is 232

But the big numbers can not be handled by the computers that exist today

How can Computers handle Big Numbers?

Only if these Big Numbers are converted into numbers which lie within the scope of computation by computers that are present today.

The Challenge

To represent these big numbers by smaller integers.

Encode Big Number into a Small Integer.

And finally Decode the Small Integer and re-create back the Big Number without any loss.

Assumptions in the Big Number Space Domain

No Negative Numbers
No Floating Numbers
Minimize Divisions

Too bad fuckedcompany didn't read the press release.

Northern Light is actually a better search engine than Google for specific info

Bull.

How's this for an obscure query: How many nanoseconds long is a shake?

Try it in Northern Light and be fuddled for a while. Now try Google and WiseNut. You won't even have to follow the hits. The answer is in the summary of the second or third hit. Not bad, IHMO.

I had completely forgotten about Northern Lights until I read about their GeoSearch feature. I gave it a shot and loved the results. I know about lasso (or whatever) but didn't like it. Is there something else out there as good as Northern Lights Geosearch?

This search engine is what they're taking down.

If there are any real factual arguments against GM foods, by all means present them.

What about the recent unexpected contamination of natural Mexican corn by genetically modified corn? If you're not familiar with this, here's the scoop: the Mexican equivalent of the US Department of Agriculture tested some corn-seed in Oaxaca and found that it had between a 3-60% rate of transgenetic contamination from species of corn that had not been imported into Mexico.

from:
UC Berkeley
Reuters
Nature, Vol. 413, September 27, 2001

My real factual argument against GM foods follows.

One: until a GM food product has existed for a number of years it is impossible to be 100% certain what effects it might have. (Think about drugs the FDA approved as good...thalidomide for one).

Two: apparently, based on the links mentioned above, it is impossible to control the dissemination of GM foods -- even the Monsanto Terminator gene isn't going to stop corn pollen.

Thus: we can't be what effects a GM food might have on the environment.

Ergo: this is a good argument for the strict control of GM foods.

And I might add, you probably don't trust Microsoft with Passport. Why would you trust Monsanto with GM foods?

I think MSNBC sucks, anyway. They have very few original articles. They mostly rehash Washington Post and standard wire services stories. Why not link to the real Washington Post or CNN or better yet Northern Light.

Northernlight categorises its returns into "Custom Search Folders", subject by subject.

Its search technology is different (its classification system is more like that of libraries) and its target audience is mostly the high-end business folks, but the actual box-to-box comparison makes me oogle: one alpha = 1000 linux boxen.

Infoseek? I'd totally forgotten about them. Weren't they eventually acquired by the Go network? Well, no matter, I quickly stopped visiting once the decline in quality became evident.

As for search engines, not that anybody cares, but... these days I like to use 1) Google, 2) Northern Light (a lot of people don't know about this one but it tied for top honors with Google in PC Magazine's test of search engines), and 3) Altavista for it's incredible flexibility. Although, at one time, I did use Yahoo, it's transition into a portal kind of turned me off. Not to mention the little period where their search engine just generally sucked. And, although they do use Google now, it just seems like Google does a better job at being Google than Yahoo does. Go figure.

On a related note, did anybody else ever use Magellan?

--------------------------------------

A few years ago, the Baltimore Sun did an interesting profile of Hamilton Smith, Celera's chief scientist who came up with their unique "shotgunning" method of sequencing DNA.

The article described how Smith won the Nobel Prize in 1978. He felt that he didn't deserve the prize because it was an achievement that he had stumbled upon by accident and hadn't worked to earn it. This caused him to lose confidence in himself and he went into a professional and personal decline. His relationship with his family deteriorated very badly. According to the article, his work with Celera has given him a chance at personal redemption. He began to piece together his family relationships, while dreaming of sequencing the human genome. He felt that this would be a groundbreaking achievement that he would truly earn the credit for. Looks like he has succeeded. Congratulations Ham!

The article is no longer available at the Sun web site, but those with Northern Light accounts can find the article here.

This Cisco exec should then be sued by the shareholders of Cisco for not making a business decision with solely the interests of Cisco the company and its shareholder value in mind. If someone is employed/appointed to the board of a company it is their responsibility to act solely in their interests with respect to his/her authority in the company.

I feel the same way but the truth is that dotcomm boards have been getting away with things that would seem unethical in traditional companies for quite a while. Here's an article on Fortune about some more weird dealings by the board of a dotcomm, most of these seem like fraud or at least seem unethical but so far not that many people seem to be getting punished.

Here's an expose on the shadiest dealing of the New Economy entitled MISADVENTURES IN THE ME-FIRST ECONOMY: Four tales from the ethical gray zone of the Internet economy from Fortune.

Grabel's Law

A lot of responses to this article are of the nature "GE foods are just fine, and anybody who disagrees is a luddite."

I have a lot of faith in science, but very little faith in human nature. We are prone to make mistakes. And when are dealing with something as powerful and potentially damaging as GE foods, I get a little concerned.

Not only do we have scientists running around altering genes when they can't possibly know all of the effects, we have greedy corporations pushing GE Foods through the FDA. We've got Monsanto trying to convince the Feds that in-house testing of their products was complete, and that their products are safe, the Feds listen because Monsanto has the cash to fund the lobbying (and campaign contributions).

The point is, how far are you going to trust someone who's main interest is pro fit ? Potrykus' motives may be humanitarian, but, then again, who knows what biotech companies he holds stock in?

Currently I am using AT&T phone plan. And although it has not been without its problems, it has been the lesser of evils to date, especially if you need to go more than 5 miles out of any city, heaven forbid Hairball, MT [watch out for the wandering moose].

all persons, living and dead, are purely coincidental. - Kurt Vonnegut

You've probably seen the T-shirt "D.A.R.E. - I turned in my parents and all I got was this lousy T-Shirt"? Orange County CA cops busted a local hemp store for selling them, and confiscated all their shirts, claiming it was a trademark violation. So much for Supreme Court cases on parody and First Amendment protection.

Here's a Northernlights search URL for "Parents Against D.A.R.E., a parents group opposing this scam.

In another spammer story worthy of a slashback mention, the same lawyer who represented Earthlink against Sanford Wallace has "obtained the broadest permanent injunction ever issued" against a spammer, in a court case in Georgia. In this case, if the spammer spams again, he could face jail time. Awright!!!
--

The article you referenced is about power lines and EMF, not about cell phones. While the principle behind the article is quite similar, there are nonetheless significant differences. I would argue that the jury is still out regarding cell phones, and that while I feel that power lines do not presently pose a significant threat to human health, we should still be concerned about other sources of EMF.

One of the replies to your post mentioned radiation output from TVs and microwaves, and they are quite a bit higher than cellphones. One recent article from Fortune is by a neurologist who has studied EMF for the last 30 years. Even though we haven't seen an explosion of cancer rates from young children watching 8 hours of TV a day, the human body doesn't always show drastic changes when it has been affected.

Bottom line, true, not everything with the word "radiation" is bad for you, but it shouldn't be necessarily ignored either. The FCC is only in its first year or two of its five year study on the effects of cellphone radiation.

Fiserv has a partnership with Security First Technologies. It will be interesting to watch how their stock changes tomorrow as this news gets around.

Fiserv: NASDAQ FISV
SFT: NASDAQ SONE

Fiserv has a partnership with Security First Technologies. It will be interesting to watch how their stock changes tomorrow as this news gets around.

Fiserv: NASDAQ FISV
SFT: NASDAQ SONE

Apparently the DoCoMo is the latest craze in Japan. Fortune magazine reports that the number of DoCoMo phones is growing by 50,000 a day! It's especially popular with teenagers, who use them to participate in chat rooms. Do Japanese technofads tend to spread here?

Do you want police protection or not? Not happy with your police? ... Become a cop.

Can't. Why? Too smart. Look here and here.

Sausage King of Chicago

sulli

I've got one of those Intellimouse Explorers (the huge silver ones with the superfluous tail light and like three extra buttons; well, what the hell, here's a http://www.microsoft.com/Mouse/explorer.htm link) and sites that won't let you back out are an incredible annoyance. See, two of the buttons on there serve as Forward/Back (respectively) while browsing the web, and after about 20 minutes of using them, I was hooked. You wouldn't believe how simple (and remarkably intuitive) to navigate with your thumb. Now if I could just find a good use for those buttons in Half-Life... I mean, sure, it's easy enough to hold down the back button and select the page before the offending site, but that would require moving my cursor over six or so linear inches of desktop space. Isn't that just a little bit unreasonable? No? Ah well.

Set up a Junkbuster proxy, enable the cookie blockfile and append to it the host www.northernlight.com. Despite Junkbuster's supposed cookie blocking, whenever you access the Northern Light search engine, you'll get a cookie!

_________________

_________________

You see, the revolution has already started, but it's actually the 'geeks' whose heads will roll, and it is the people like Jon 'executive producer' Katz who will be doing the chopping. Yes, there will be much wailing and crashing of NTeeth ( ;) ) but the PHBs would rather die in control than survive only at the mercy of detested 'geeks'.

As for me, I'm unfortunately not socially acceptable enough to fit Jon's image. I have yet to see TPM, only saw the matrix when given a VHS tape of it as a present, and am as likely to enjoy Confucian Chinese culture (The Analects is pretty cool reading) as pop culture, if not more so. If I buy a magazine it's a geeky one- I consider Cinefex (EFX professional geeks) and Ultraflight (ultralight aircraft geeks) to be geeky. I'll devour these for information. I know a lot about many things but never mastered fun or recreation...

...and in some ways this is a type of geekiness, but in other ways it's something else: autism. I have Asperger's Syndrome, which has colored my life a huge amount. As such, I can't seriously think I speak for anybody in particular, much less 'geeks', and if Katz manages to make a whole pop subculture out of selfproclaimed 'geeks' to rule the world, I doubt it'd have anything to do with me, I doubt any of the new 'geeks' would have any sense that I was one of them.

And I am OK with this, because _they_ are the ones lining up for the guillotine: http://library.northernlight.com/PN200001132400001 25.html?cb=13&sc=0. Me, well maybe I am just some stupid autistic person who doesn't understand what it is to be properly human, but all this 'rule the world' stuff seems very stupid to me. What will you do with it once you rule it? Who will sanitize the telephones, or middle manage? At least you're led by a tired TV producer :)

You see, the revolution has already started, but it's actually the 'geeks' whose heads will roll, and it is the people like Jon 'executive producer' Katz who will be doing the chopping. Yes, there will be much wailing and crashing of NTeeth ( ;) ) but the PHBs would rather die in control than survive only at the mercy of detested 'geeks'.

As for me, I'm unfortunately not socially acceptable enough to fit Jon's image. I have yet to see TPM, only saw the matrix when given a VHS tape of it as a present, and am as likely to enjoy Confucian Chinese culture (The Analects is pretty cool reading) as pop culture, if not more so. If I buy a magazine it's a geeky one- I consider Cinefex (EFX professional geeks) and Ultraflight (ultralight aircraft geeks) to be geeky. I'll devour these for information. I know a lot about many things but never mastered fun or recreation...

...and in some ways this is a type of geekiness, but in other ways it's something else: autism. I have Asperger's Syndrome, which has colored my life a huge amount. As such, I can't seriously think I speak for anybody in particular, much less 'geeks', and if Katz manages to make a whole pop subculture out of selfproclaimed 'geeks' to rule the world, I doubt it'd have anything to do with me, I doubt any of the new 'geeks' would have any sense that I was one of them.

And I am OK with this, because _they_ are the ones lining up for the guillotine: http://library.northernlight.com/PN200001132400001 25.html?cb=13&sc=0. Me, well maybe I am just some stupid autistic person who doesn't understand what it is to be properly human, but all this 'rule the world' stuff seems very stupid to me. What will you do with it once you rule it? Who will sanitize the telephones, or middle manage? At least you're led by a tired TV producer :)

I use a combination of northernlight, google, and alltheweb. They work great for finding all that I need.