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Northern Light Inconsistencies

Last updated Jul. 12, 2023.
by Greg R.

Northern Light was one of the largest general Web search engines before it cease to offer public Web searching in 2003. This file remains available to document some of the inconsistent behavior that occurred on Northern Light.

PHRASE SEARCHING: If a phrase of more than two words is entered in Northern Light, it may or may not actually search it as a phrase. While two word phrase searches work fine, try a search such as "vice president of fun" and then see if you can find that actual phrase in any of the over 10,000 results.
Status: Ongoing

TRUNCATION: The truncation symbols do not always work properly. I was first alerted to this in May 1999 by Pierre Adant. Using the same terms he used, here are updated numbers as of October 1999:

1.	`pluie acide`	1027	Basic French terms for acid rain entered without phrase notation.
2.	`pluies acides`	2199	Plurals are non-English and are thus not automatically searched. So the number should be different.
3.	`pluie* acide*`	1035	This should be larger than the previous search but is actually about half the size
4.	`pluie% acide%`	None	This should find at least as many as the second search, but it acts as if none can be found.

I have also seen similar problems with English and non-English terms when the single character truncation symbol % is used at the end of the word. This behavior is explanined in part because Northern Light stores the terms as the singular form, so that pluie% would not match anything since pluies is stored as pluie. However, this is not what users expect.
Status: Ongoing