Seeking to tighten its focus on enterprise customers while trimming expenses and unprofitable business, Northern Light Technology LLC announced this week plans to eliminate its free search service by Jan. 16.
The Cambridge, Mass., company maintains an online business library of more than 70 million pages of content from more than 7,100 sources and an index of more than 350 million Web pages, officials said. As of Jan. 16, searches of that information will be available to paying customers only, mostly enterprises.
“Over the past year, Northern Light has seen booming demand for search, classification, taxonomy and content solutions from our enterprise customers and marketing partners,” said Northern Light Technology CEO David Seuss, in a statement. “Meanwhile, the business model for free, advertising-supported, public Web search has not been developing for us. We made a strategic decision to discontinue free public access to our Web search in order to focus resources and investment on those parts of our business that are growing rapidly.”
Seuss said Northern Lights sales bookings for its enterprise offerings in the quarter ending in December were double the previous quarter.
The Northern Light.com site will continue to serve as a news portal and content archive while the company concentrates on enterprise search and content integration, officials said.