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Northern Light Technology Makes Deal WIth C.I.A.

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the focusing-on-revenues dept.

Llywelyn writes: "The C.I.A. has evidently written up a contract with the group Northern Light Technology to develop a search engine that can sort through the C.I.A's increasing mound of unprocessed data. Unfortunately, one of the consequences of this is that Northern Light's public search engine is fated for destruction later this month. " It's inevitable, IMHO, that some of this happen - the search engine world is overpopulated right now, and with the economic downturn, more and more companies will move to where they can survive.

8 of 125 comments (clear)

  1. Still Available ... Why Not Google? by pgrote · · Score: 5, Informative

    .... will still have access to the site for a fee. The agreement isn't with the CIA for exclusive use.

    One of the neater features of Northern Lights was the folders. I liked how they organized the info and let it flow out of your continuous clicking.

    What is funny is that Northern Light is actually a better search engine than Google for specific info. Northern Light drills down on the subject only and doesn't take into consideration links to the info as Google does.

    1. Re:Still Available ... Why Not Google? by aka-ed · · Score: 2, Informative

      I don't mean to be Google's official defender/apologist, but searching Google for The Hobyahs results in 323 hits. It displays 171, with an option to also show the rest which are filtered out as duplicates. Must've been a server problem when you tried. (Itself not a good sign, but I've never seen a failure like that myself.)

      --
      I survived the Dick Cheney Presidency 7 to 9 AM 7-21-07
    2. Re:Still Available ... Why Not Google? by doc_clustering · · Score: 2, Informative

      Users who like highly organized websearch results and despair at Northern Light's policy change could try instead http://vivisimo.com, which accomplishes a similar goal using document clustering, which organizes a small set of search results (e.g., 200) dynamically without using any pre-defined categories. It works by analyzing the
      words & phrases within the search results, and then uses a built-in general understanding of what makes for good cluster labels (e.g.,
      phrases) to do its thing.

      Besides web search, there's clustering of lots of other internet content at http://vivisimo.com/html/demos/index.html

      such as corporate websites (Microsoft, Sun, Cisco, HP), government, universities, science, news, ebay, etc. etc.

  2. Re:it aint the CIA.... by lorax · · Score: 2, Informative

    They aren't a contractor, they are fully funded and run by the CIA. I think they are also the venture capital arm of the CIA as well.

  3. Re:Huh? by demaria · · Score: 3, Informative

    http://boston.internet.com/news/article/0,1928,200 1_950451,00.html
    Public free search engine didn't pan out for them.

  4. This is a venture capital deal, not a contract by Nick+Arnett · · Score: 5, Informative

    In-Q-Tel is a venture capital fund set up by the CIA to invest in technologies that may serve the intelligence community. This is not a CIA contract for search technology. The CIA was Verity Inc.'s first big customer and as far as I know, they're still mostly using Verity internally (I managed Verity Internet products for years).

    And the article misspelled Gilman Louie's name...

    Nick

    1. Re:This is a venture capital deal, not a contract by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

      Gilman Louie, for those who don't know, is the man behind the Falcon flight simulator series. He's also the man who helped drive Microprose straight into the ground.

      (a former Spectrum Holobyte/Microprose employee)

  5. There are less search engines than you think by jargon · · Score: 5, Informative
    the search engine world is overpopulated right now

    This is just not true. Over the last year, more and more search engine companies are effectively consolidating - by licencing "search engine technology" from another company. The real down side of this is that the more popular (popular by the licencing...not by users) are a "pay" engine, whereby companies can move their listings higher in the rankings by paying a fee.

    This has two main side effects.

    One, there are a lot of search engines out there that are really the same search engine. Same query, same results.

    Two, when you search with them, you're not really getting what you asked for, but what someone payed for.


    I understand why companies are doing this - there isn't a really strong revenue model for search engines right now; banners don't cut it.

    I suspect that soon, good search engines will just be a (hopefully) inexpensive pay site, where you pay $30 a year and can use that search engine.

    --
    /dev/psychic: No medium found