In-Q-Tel, the Central Intelligence Agency's independent, private, non-profit company funded by the U.S. Government, is teaming with Northern Light Technology, LLC, of Cambridge, Mass., to develop an advanced search system that will eliminate the need to manually sift through countless documents in a variety of languages. Financial terms of the partnership were not disclosed.

A comprehensive, yet highly targeted, crawl of Web sites identified by classification experts will be used to create a database of all the relevant information while excluding sites deemed to be of little value to an organization's goals.

Users will access the search service via keyword or Boolean syntax, or a combination of search techniques. Northern Light's multiple-factor relevance ranking algorithm will be used to order the results and will be customized to meet specialized requirements.

But consumer users of Northern Light's free search engine will no longer be able to use the service as of Jan. 16 as the company will no longer offer free Web searches to the masses, focusing instead on large companies and government organizations.

"This new application of Northern Light's technology can deliver just the right information to our clients to save them from extensive and time-consuming searches typically done manually," said Gilam Louie, chief executive officer of In-Q-Tel. "It is a dramatic increase in both efficiency and accuracy. Now users can quickly determine what's relevant and what's not. Northern Light is providing a valuable new application with tremendous potential to our governmental clients."

Northern Light's enterprise search products include the Northern Light Enterprise Search Engine, SinglePoint Custom Content Integration service, and licensing of the Special Collection, an online business research library of over 70 million pages of full text documents from over 7,100 business and news sources.

"With the U.S government as its client, In-Q-Tel is a sophisticated user of new information technologies for timely and precise information. We are delighted that they have looked to Northern Light to aggregate, search, and filter critical information. By working with In-Q-Tel, we are running our technology in one of the most challenging enterprise environments out there," said David Seuss, chief executive officer of Northern Light.

In-Q-Tel's principal objective is to identify and deliver the next generation of information technologies to support the CIA's critical intelligence missions. In-Q-Tel works with private and public companies in the U.S. and around the globe. It also partners with universities, established companies and labs. Founded in 1999, In-Q-Tel has offices in Northern Virginia and Menlo Park, Calif.

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