Using the new Power Search tab, users can narrow searches in a variety of ways. Northern Light's page classification types can also be used to narrow searches. These include Page Type, Language, Sources, and Subject.
Language is determined by a dictionary-based system.
Northern Light can also sort listings by date, the only major search engine to offer this. Date reflects when a page was created or modified, though not all documents will have them, as some web servers fail to report a date. Northern Light also rejects dates if they are clearly inaccurate, which was an unexpected problem. After all, older documents are not necessarily less relevant. Also, some documents given minor changes may suddenly appear to be newer.