During the rise of Internet search engines, Terabase developed the award winning Northern Light Web Search Engine Northern Light Technologies^* (acquired by divine, Inc. in 2001).

Northern Light was the first Web search engine that provided access to both general World Wide Web content and high-value paid content.  By combining Web information with the authoritative sources of corporate information, Northern Light provided a “buy by the sip” information utility for corporate customers. These customers — typically business researchers or special librarians — were tasked with finding qualified information sources, were looking for solutions for corporate knowledge workers.

Terabase delivered core server technology for the Northern Light Web Search Engine by leveraging the Terabase^®/SRF Search and Retrieval Facility in conjunction with highly reliable OpenVMS Alpha clusters.  Terabase designed the database schema, provided all of the database loading and indexing and query software, and implemented classification and relevancy software satisfying Northern Light’s specific requirements.  Northern Light crawled the Web, prepared all of the data for loading and operated the service — including managing the front-end servers, the document servers, and the creation of the categorization taxonomy.