Fee-based commercial online services such as Dialog are expensive, but the free information on the Web often does not meet a searcher's need. It takes time to first search the Web and then the commercial services. The ideal would be a combination of the two. One such "hybrid" service is Northern Light-a service about which we were asked recently, but had not used.
Northern Light offers a Web index of more than 75 million pages and nearly 3,500 "premium" publications for which a fee is charged. Search results are not only displayed in order of relevance, but are grouped into custom search folders in a sidebar on specific subjects, types, sources, or languages. Each displayed source is labeled to show whether it is a free Web site or a fee-based commercial service. If one chooses a fee-based commercial service, a free document summary, publication details, and price are given. The typical price is $1 to $4. The charge can be against a credit card or against a subscription account.
The major drawbacks of Northern Light are the lack of Boolean operators (in development) and search limiting (in planning) , limited backfiles for the premium services (generally 1995) , and reliance on less-known daily newspapers rather than the most widely-read ones.
[Contact: Northern Light @ http://nlsearch.com]
