By Estelle Dumout, 8 January 2007 12:35
NEWS
Quaero, the pan-European search effort intended to rival Google, has seen the German government withdraw its support, while Brussels has promised 8.5m to a rival local search project, Pharos.
The German government has cited differences over the technological direction of the project for its desertion, less than two years after the Quaero project kicked off, and has decided to follow its own search path, Hartmut Schauerte, a secretary of state attached to the German Economics Ministry said recently.
Quaero - intended by the French as a multimedia search engine focused around indexing photos and videos - will now become a solely French project, led by Thomson, with the support of Arvato, start-up Exalead, France Telecom, or LTU Technologies, as well as assistance from the INA (National Institute of the Audiovisual) and research institute Inria.
Berlin will now concentrate on its own search effort, named Theseus. Theseus will focus on semantic research: understanding the context of a search request.
A French businessman involved with the project told daily newspaper Libération: "Quaero has never been a Franco-German project except in the head of the politicians. We saw the Germans once for a meeting and that's all."
Since Germany's decision to exit Quaero in late December the EC has since awarded 8.5m to another search project called Pharos.
Pharos will be a platform for search of audiovisual resources across online spaces, led by Norwegian search software company Fast. It will be both privately and publicly financed and it has recently been awarded 8.5m by the European Commission.
Thirteen partners from nine countries - Austria, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Norway, Spain, Switzerland and the UK - will be involved in the project, including France Telecom and various educational institutes.
Estelle Dumout writes for ZDNet France
Comments
There are 3 comments. Join the discussion
1. Nicholas Azazel
Call me cynical but why does europe need a search engine? Is this in order to provided content control over it's users?
2. John Ray
Yet another example of the EC wasting taxpayers money; the lead beneficiary and one of the other countries involved aren't even in the EC.
3. Brian Catt
Has anyone else noticed how vulnerable Google is becoming to a challengs since they became a money driven public company?
The quality of google searches is nowhere near as good as it was because advertising is distorting the natural ranking of the results. The most useful URLs are often pushed down to the second or third pages by less relevant but related commercial sites who have paid to be pushed up the rankings.
Greed always wins in America.
Is there a better site now?
Brian Catt