Northern Light ends free search

January 18, 2002

Last week brought the news of yet another major search engine changing course or focus as Northern Light Technology LLC announced it is eliminating its free Web search service to focus on paying customers, mostly enterprise clients. You can read the story at www.eWeek.com.

How does that affect our advertisers at I-5 Directories? Not directly. But it does add up. In the past year or so we've seen top search engines like Go.com and Excite get bought out, only to be mismanaged. They are now only a shell of their past worth to the internet surfer.

We register our sites with many search engines and sites. And these sites do provide visibility for our city business directories, and in turn our advertisers and your potential customers. We have to know how to make sense of it.

One way is to simply keep on going. We've been in the business for 5 years now, operating in the black every single year. There are few internet companies who can say that.

Another is to talk of our business model, which has never depended on "advertising" in the manner of so many in the dotcom realm-banner ads.

No, the advertising we provide, is web positioning. Everyone in business knows the difference between running an ad campaign on your local radio station and being in the local yellow pages.

One is great if you can afford it. While the other is essential. Well, we've never had banner ads on our sites, but we are essential.

Our pages are simple, yet effective. While they lack the bells and whistles of other sites, they don't require the resources to maintain them. So we can focus on web positioning and our clients.

Rather than making a huge splash, we keep plugging away, offering basic services and an affordable internet presence to small business.

Simply put, it works.

 

PR/Press contact:

André Prochaska
andre@i-5online.com