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EU to Develop Search Engine

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the searching-for-answers dept.

William Robinson writes "Digital Media is reporting that French President Jacques Chirac is making plans for a European search engine called "Quaero" to rival US internet companies such as Yahoo and Google. From the article: 'Those involved in the Quaero project, including Thomson, France Telecom and Deutsche Telekom, have said that it will be much more than a typical search engine. It will provide an array of multimedia tools for identifying and indexing images, sound and text. Quaero will also reportedly include a powerful translating tool which will be able to 'understand' audio as well as text. The developers plan to make Quaero available on all platforms, including PCs, mobile devices and digital TVs.'"

4 of 460 comments (clear)

  1. Quaero.eu by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    In Europe, ".com" is not ubiquitous. Instead, the common format is to use the .xx country-based TLD. Or, if you are going to be EU-wide, as suggested in the article, then you would be Quaero.eu and not some silly .com

    Additionally, who knows what kind of alternative algorithm tweak they might give results. For example, boosting .xx results slightly over .com results. Or perhaps boosting links which get .xx links TO them instead of *all* links (translation: what is more important to Europeans, as valued by links, ranks higher than generic-global links). Or perhaps they'll give greater wait to .eu based clicks as votes.

    There are any number of ways to adjust the complex search result forumlas. Google is *not* the only game in town, even if they have been the best at it so far.

    Don't playa-hate, Googlefanbois! See what Quaero comes up with, first. Hell, even dare to TRY it! :o

    Vive le concurrence!

  2. How much will they have to block. by DAldredge · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Since most of Europe has 'hate speech' laws, how much of the net will this search engine be forced to block?

  3. Re:Why? by NewbieProgrammerMan · · Score: 4, Interesting
    Also, just because the government says that it should "understand" spoken audio, I'm pretty sure that no existing technology could even come close...
    Isn't the lack of existing technology usually the reason one funds research?
    --
    [b.belong('us') for b in bases if b.owner() == 'you']
  4. Re:Anything you can do I can do better... by atrizzah · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Agreed. In light of this and the Galileo story, I'm having trouble seeing how spending government money to reinvent everything America has is a good idea.