Northern Light Group, LLC is an American technology company that specializes in

enterprise search Enterprise search is software technology for searching data sources internal to a company, typically intranet and database content. The search is generally offered only to users internal to the company. Enterprise search can be contrasted with web ...

technology,

text analytics Text mining, text data mining (TDM) or text analytics is the process of deriving high-quality information from plain text, text. It involves "the discovery by computer of new, previously unknown information, by automatically extracting information ...

solutions and research engines that combine traditional

search engine A search engine is a software system that provides hyperlinks to web pages, and other relevant information on World Wide Web, the Web in response to a user's web query, query. The user enters a query in a web browser or a mobile app, and the sea ...

functions with access to non-web based

publications To publish is to make Content (media), content available to the general public.Berne Conv ...

. The company provides custom, hosted turnkey solutions for its clients using the

software as a service Software as a service (SaaS ) is a cloud computing service model where the provider offers use of application software to a client and manages all needed physical and software resources. SaaS is usually accessed via a web application. Unlike o ...

(SaaS) delivery model. Northern Light markets its research portals under the trade name SinglePoint. Typical applications for SinglePoint research portals are in

market research Market research is an organized effort to gather information about target markets and customers. It involves understanding who they are and what they need. It is an important component of business strategy and a major factor in maintaining com ...

competitive intelligence Competitive intelligence (CI) is the process and forward-looking practices used in producing knowledge about the competitive environment to improve organizational performance. Competitive intelligence involves systematically collecting and anal ...

product management Product management is the business process of planning, developing, launching, and managing a product or service. It includes the entire lifecycle of a product, from ideation to development to go to market. Product managers are responsible for ...

product development New product development (NPD) or product development in business and engineering covers the complete process of launching a new product to the market. Product development also includes the renewal of an existing product and introducing a product ...

, and R&D. Northern Light's client base consists of global companies that typically have more than $10 billion in annual sales. Northern Light has been selected for more than ten years in a row (as of 2023) as one of the "100 Companies That Matter In Knowledge Management" by ''KMWorld'' magazine and as "50 Companies that Matter in AI" in 2023.

History

The company is named after the

clipper ship A clipper was a type of mid-19th-century Merchant ship, merchant Sailing ship, sailing vessel, designed for speed. The term was also retrospectively applied to the Baltimore clipper, which originated in the late 18th century. Clippers were gen ...

'' Northern Light'', which held the speed record for the

San Francisco San Francisco, officially the City and County of San Francisco, is a commercial, Financial District, San Francisco, financial, and Culture of San Francisco, cultural center of Northern California. With a population of 827,526 residents as of ...

Boston Boston is the capital and most populous city in the Commonwealth (U.S. state), Commonwealth of Massachusetts in the United States. The city serves as the cultural and Financial centre, financial center of New England, a region of the Northeas ...

voyage for nearly 150 years. From its founding in 1996 until January 2002, Northern Light operated a

Web search engine A search engine is a software system that provides hyperlinks to web pages, and other relevant information on World Wide Web, the Web in response to a user's web query, query. The user enters a query in a web browser or a mobile app, and the sea ...

for public use, originally on the domain nlsearch.com. It was regarded at the time as innovative in provision of search based on classification and inclusion of both public and proprietary information resources. During this time period, Northern Light also developed private custom search engines for large corporate clients marketed under the trade name SinglePoint. In 2002, Northern Light was acquired by Divine, Inc., an enterprise software company. Divine made 28 acquisitions, and Northern Light was the 17th. In 2003, an employee group bought the company from its parent and it is still employee-owned as of 2023 and SinglePoint is its main product line. According to the company's website, as of 2023 Northern Light has 250,000 users of its SinglePoint platform at its corporate clients.

References

{{Web search engines American companies established in 1996 Technology companies established in 1996 Technology companies based in Massachusetts