Forum Moderators: bakedjake
Week of April 28, 2003: Auction will take place
Week of April 28, 2003: Court will finalize results of auction (exact date to be determined by the Court)
Which refers to the auction of their business units & assets. I know we had at least 1 member that was interested in perhaps purchasing their completely defunct NorthernLight Search Engien [northernlight.com] but he (afaik) never got any response out of them.
A sticky mail received about a month ago mentioned something about an investigation, though that is complete rumor (as far as I know..haven't seen a link to a story).
The thing is, NorthernLight was just 2 years ago voted a 'really good' search engine, what with their filters, automatic categorization of stuff into 'topic folders' similar to Vivisimo.
If NorthernLight can't make it, and they started out long ago, it seems to me that the case may be more bleak than we realize for any other search engine to come out of the blue and start making it big.
<added> there was a story yesterday, found via Google News:
Equity firm bids for Divine Assets [chicagobusiness.com] though there isn't one mention of NorthernLight.
Is it that worthless now, that the search function hasn't worked in more than a month, and that property isn't even mentioned in the liquidation article?
Seems Divine burned through more than a billion, according to the article. Wow...
If NorthernLight can't make it, and they started out long ago, it seems to me that the case may be more bleak than we realize for any other search engine to come out of the blue and start making it big.
You seem way to pessimistic to me. NL was indeed a good engine, but its design and the SERPS never attracted the masses. The usage of NL was to complicated for the average surfer.
If there comes a new engine which succeeds in attracting other people than just the web savvy, I think chances are good for this engine to become big - given, of course, that the rest of the issues are done well.
I'm afraid, NL is in this moment arriving at search engine heaven and there sitting next to Infoseek, Lycos and Excite ...
But we've been following these other 'baby engines' here, for a while now, and the amount of clicks I get from any of them are much less than I still get from Excite (via Google syndication - but still).
If an engine wins awards, etc - and still can't keep up with the times even after being infused with capital from a company that burned through 1 billion USD in less than 4 years, well, it seem that the case may be a bit more 'bleak' than I had thought.
But - my question was about news on Divine. Excite has kept a bit of an audience...I wonder if NL would have any left, if it did get a buyer?
imho, it's probably been 'killed' because you still get that 500 error...as bad as it got for Excite, they never did that (left the engine broke for so long).
Most people want to enter a few words and get decent results. Advanced search, who among the masses really cares?
Maybe some college project will be able to develop something better, build a buzz and get some traction in the market but they'll be few and far between.
Being a site with a heavy focus on search engines, WW might be able to put an engine on the map or at least create enough buzz to get the ball rolling.
Sadly, I have to agree. I'm not sure what the solution is.
NL is dead and I don't see any replacements on the horizon.
