The Inference Find meta-search service comes closest to matching Northern Light's folder system. It groups documents in a similar way. However, as a meta-crawler, it only pulls back the top results from a variety of search services. Northern Light's results, in contrast, are based on the original document set from its own index. Northern Light plans to eventually recrawl its index every two weeks, plus have the spider revisit sites based on frequency of changes.
Webmasters can register their sites with the search engine for a visit.
Meta tags are indexed but not implemented. The text will be noted, but the description will not be controlled by the tag, nor is any special weight attached to the keywords. There are documents from about 1,800 sources, including newswires, magazines and databases. Searching these documents is free until Sept. 11. This is an approach originally tried by Infoseek when it launched, but it was later abandoned.