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Northern Light Unveils New Search Product Aimed At Extracting Meaning Rather Than Keywords
By Ned May
May 8, 2007
Important Details: Northern Light announced a new product on May 7th targeted at the market intelligence functions within large enterprises. The new product, called MI Analyst, is an automated “meaning extraction” application that uses sophisticated text mining and analytics to vastly improve the user’s experience with search. It is being offered as an add-on program to Northern Light’s SinglePoint enterprise market research portal which provides an integrated index across a company’s internal and external information sources via a tailored search portal. Enterprise-wide licenses for the add-on will start at $48,000 per year.
Implications: A few weeks ago we reminded readers that in the world of search you still get what you pay for, and it is harder to find a better example of this than in Northern Light’s SinglePoint and MI Analyst products. They are not cheap, but with the investment comes an experience and result far superior to general web search. And there are many ways to look at cost - taking a broader view that looks at ROI including impacts from applying the information found may just indicate these products are in fact a bargain.
Outsell’s research indicates corporate information users spend 55% of their time searching for information and only 45% of the time analyzing it. For an enterprise with 5 market intelligence personnel each costing a firm $100,000 per year, this translates into $275,000 per year spent on looking. Simply freeing up those 5 people to spend only 20% of their time searching would equate to an annual savings (or investment in analysis) of $175,000. And the uses of this product go well beyond a core market intelligence group. Our research also indicates over 76% of corporate users prefer to seek out information themselves rather than have someone else find it on their behalf. This means the cost savings goes well beyond a core group of MI staff.
Market research vendors should welcome this new product as it leads to a higher probability their research will be discovered at the moments when it’s most needed and valuable to the user. Today these vendors operate on the premise that if good research is written it will be read. But relevance (a key component in perceived quality) depends largely on timing that is specific to each reader. This means research firms are dependent on their subscribers either to remember a prior report or to log on to their own site and navigate through it, facing unique variances in functionality and taxonomies, in an attempt to locate the most relevant reports.
Northern Light’s SinglePoint has eliminated that need by standardizing the discovery of an enterprise’s external information sources, and now its MI Analyst takes it a step further by improving the relevance of each search. In essence, it moves from keyword relevance to “document relevance”. And all of this translates to a better experience with external research - and likely more stable renewal rates for those firms - as the reports they laboriously write more frequently make it to the end users desktop at the time of need. However, the combined product does have the potential to level the playing field for market research firms as time-constrained seekers will no longer automatically choose to search the most well-known firm’s site. For the smaller research firms this could be a boon.
Northern Light is quick to claim its neutrality in working with market research providers. This neutrality is critical in maintaining relationships that allow it to scan and index research reports as they are published and to serve up this data to its own clients’ portals along with a direct link back to the report on the original publisher’s site. But Northern Light does compete at least indirectly for part of an enterprise’s information management budget and its current price point limits its target market to only the largest of firms. However, for the 17% of corporations that have indicated to us they are evaluating the deployment of an integrated enterprise search engine, Northern Light’s SinglePoint and MI Analyst deserves a careful look.