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Germany Quits EU-Based Search Engine Project
anaesthetica writes "The Quaero project, a French initiative to build a European rival to Google, has lost the backing of the German government. The search engine was announced in 2005 by Jacques Chirac and Gerhard Schroeder, but the German government under Merkel has decided that Quaero isn't worth the $1.3-2.6 billion commitment that development would require. Germany will instead focus on a smaller search engine project called Theseus. From the article: 'According to one French participant, organizers disagreed over the fundamental design of Quaero, with French participants favoring a sophisticated search engine that could sift audio, video and other multimedia data, while German participants favored a next- generation text-based search engine.'"
Just link to google.com?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think Google required 2.6 billion ANYTHING to get started. A true competitor for Google will not require a ton of money, but a ton of brainpower. Google is successful because their have a great philosophy and attract the best and brightest. They know how to treat their people (customers and employees both) right and do so.
What would make them think that pooring money into a startup could create what numerous other companies couldn't? (MS, Yahoo, AskJeeves, etc) AskJeeves even had a really great idea (natural language queries) and STILL didn't make it.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
I think it was a weird project in the first place, and quite a waste. Trying to make something better than Google would be like trying to catch up with Michael Schumacher while he's got 9 laps of advance on you. Why spend 2 billions on something as useless anyways, we (in France) have a trillion euros debt, an economic situation (among others) that could be better and we're pumping 2 billions into THAT?
You just got troll'd!
Theseus is thought to be some /semantic/ search engine, so this would be at least something new compared with Google. But don't ask me what is exactly meant by "semantic search engine", nor ask me about Theseus, I did not find any link on its project page. I have this information from German Heise forum some weeks ago (it's in German!):
/ rss09
http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/82708/from
As much as I don't like the Google monopoly, I felt/feel uncomfortable with a state/big company founded alternative driven by a French/German/European resentment against Google/the US.
So as a person born, raised and up to the Master educated in Germany I like the following statement from the article:
What I would like to see is a more community developed alternative to Google. And come on, Google is brilliant and huge but it can't be the end of development in the search engine field.
And even Google started small, they just had something new and way better than what was there.
And if it's true
Well, they should invent either the engine to the wheel or get rid of the wheel idea and invent wings.
"Hannibal's plans never work right. They just work." Amy/A-Team
So 1.2999bn goes into endless pointless meetings, consultants, market research, unrelated university research grants and other nonesense, leaving some scraps over for some second rate programmers. Does anyone really believe a govermnent run project like this has a chance of success???
They probably left when they heard that the search engine would eventually be going into Iraq
Since Google tests and refines it's search using http://www.searchmash.com/, maybe they should be trying to out-do Google's future instead of trying to keep up with it's present?
Pardon my ignorance, but how exactly is this project 'EU based'? /just my 2 eurocents
A project based in Europe, yes, but as far as I can tell only the Germans and French are involved.
According to the article, the EU isn't funding this project.
As for a geographical reason to call it EU based..
The EU has 27 member states so it sounds a bit silly.
You don't call a British project 'EU based', do you?
Besides, it suggests a kind of pan-European cooperation which just isn't there...
Well, besides the obvious Franco-German axis, but they're just trying too hard with their whole zomfg America Sucks!!1 angle
There is no technology on earth that could fix this mess http://europa.eu/index_en.htm
God thanks I'm unemployed and not wasting any precious money on this by paying taxes.
I'd go onto the street. But staying unemployed and just not paying taxes has become much more efficient these days.
fascist rouge
I just got a flashback of a heavily made-up and pucker-lipped Joel Grey singing "Money Makes The World Go 'Round," which has amused me, but I'll probably have that song in my head now for the rest of the week, which is not so amusing.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
It has nothing to do with a search engine, France wanted to invest money in hi-tech. Thompson knows how to get lots of money out of governments, and lobbied to get money for a search engine. Deutsch Telecom knows how to milk the German government and joins in.
They convinced Chirac that it would need billions, he promises hundreds of millions. He expects to see key European talent flooding into Paris, instead Thompson uses the money internally.
That is not a search engine they are building, it is just an attempt to milk money from governments for IT. If Video was hot when they launched it, they'd be making a video CODEC instead.
Merkel is better off spending the money in smaller university projects or a smaller project with better talent. As little as 10-20 top notch people is all it would take even today.
... and thats how they want it. What they want, they get.
I've noticed that there are a number of ways that innovative IT projects get done:
1 - Somebody gets an idea, doesn't ask permission, just implements it and it grows
2 - Somebody has an idea, pays others to implement it and it grows, or dies
3 - Somebody has an idea, wastes untold funds on implementing it the wrong way, it dies
4 - Somebody has an idea, government wastes untold funds implementing the wrong idea
5 - variations on one of the above
The trouble with saying that we are going to do something different than what the current market leader has done is that it seldom works if it is supposed to supplant that current leader. Some recent examples? VHS vs. Betamax? HD-DVD vs DVD? Zune vs. iPod?
Google has not quite been iconized to the point that Hoover or Kleenex have been, but trying to replace Google at this point is the same as the Intel vs. AMD issues except that Google is way ahead of anyone else (don't bother pointing out the other available search engines at this point since it is not germane).
Germany and the EU may well demand that there is an EU equal to Google, but it does not follow that this government alternative will become self sustaining. If it can't function without life supporting funds from governments, it will be discontinued at some point.
Even if the technology is mature, there doesn't seem to be any business model to make this EU funded search engine self supporting. When the funds begin to dry up, so will innovation at this new search engine company, and that will signal the end of it. If Google stops innovating, it too will find its own end of life coming. Lack of innovation == lack of relevance in the fast pace of high tech. Governments are notorious for 'lack of innovation' problems.
Whether this is a good idea on Germany's part or not, there doesn't seem to be any historical evidence to indicate that this project will be long lived.
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
They could quietly grab the bookmarks from everyone as an initial base set of "quality" links.
;)
Then of course they would be evil and in direct competition with Google.
They already have the fox in hell, so might as well make him work
liqbase
Obviously, the Slashdot URL regex does not like Umlaute ... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enabling_Act
Screw the FSM - Real geeks believe in the Invisible Pink Unicorn
Why will this project cost billions when someone just needs to download an open source solution like Nutch (http://lucene.apache.org/nutch) and start injecting URLs?? While the Nutch algorithm is not on par with PageRank, it has parser plugins for virtually all popular doc types and should scale nicely due to the Hadoop distributed file system. Perhaps some European governments could even donate money or code to the project. Presumably the reason for a European effort is coverage/content quality and privacy concerns. Nutch would address those issues...or is the real reason pride and the fear of "not-invented-here"?
as a 'loser in 2007'. This was in their January 2007 Edition. Kind of interesting that Germany has already pulled out. See: http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/jan07/4842
Currently searchmash doesn't give me any results. Maybe it's because I don't have javascript enabled.
If that's where Google is going, I hope there will be an alternative. A UI for search shouldn't require javascript.
I am so sick of the default answer to all things in a capitalist economy; "competition will make the products better". Sure, in the short run all of the products get optimized, but not necessarily "better". Car makers have plenty of so-called competition in design, fuel efficiency, production, etc, but where is our uber-efficient electric car? All we get for our money are SUVs and sports cars. If you want an efficient gas-electric you need to wait a year or two for Toyota to allow you to have one. That is competition at its best.
So Germany wisely decided that $2.6B to reinvent the wheel isn't a good investment. Good for them. Google may not be the best is can be, but I'm willing to bet that any "competition" between search engines will follow the same lines it has already - namely added features like calendars, blogs, and browser-embedded search windows. Like I need another buggy feature to support for my users.
Here will be an old abusing of God's patience and the king's English.
I may be missing something, but isn't searching text (all types of documents) much more important for **real work** that searching pictures and video?
On the other hand, I believe in the utility of next generation text search that clusters documents and allows search for words by word sense (search for "bank" in the sense noun, financial institution - and not return results for "by the bank of the river", "bank the airplane to he right", etc.). Also, support better search within search, etc. I am working on these technologies for my little http://knowledgebooks.com/ business.
I do get high value from online videos of technical talks and really enjoy listening or watching keynote talks, etc. However, I know what sites to go to for technical talk videos. If I need to search for photos (seldom), Flickr and Picasa/Google work fine. Fun sites like YouTube.com are easily searchable. Actually, a little OT, but: YouTube.com is useful in a practical sense: a good source of news clips covering wider points of view not usually seen on news media owned by our corporate overlords/masters.
...but Google is NSA!
<<:-)
Why the hell do the french and germans feel its necessary to create a search engine to compete with google? Why don't the work on an OS to compete with Windows? And what part does the french and german governments play in this? Isn't the french competitive strategy to run away from threats?
> Germany and the EU may well demand that there is an EU equal to Google
/. article you'd know that Germany is actually OPPOSED to the idea of a government driven search engine, that's why the pulled out. More often than not it's the French that are in love with gargantuan government projects.
If you'd RTFA or even just the
I followed a bit this 'Quaero' quest and it seems that:
...)
;)
- Public funding has not yet started and is not likely to start (french elections, EU commission blocking, etc
- Even though no public $$ has been spent yet, Exalead, a Quaero member, already has a Web search engine, with a few billion pages, and some nice features. (thumbnails and automatic clustering)
Conclusion: this Quaero project is a french politic vaporware, BUT any private french or european company may still have a chance to produce something interesting for the search engine market. Even if they're french
After all, yo Quaero Taco Bell.
Hoi!
Slightly OT, but... Just wondering wtf Nazis (again) have to do with this..?
Please, tell me - anyone?? 8)
Regards,
- Michicaust
you were expecting HD-DVD to overtake DVD sales in less than six months when HDTV has become mass market only in the past year?
Bureaucracy is almost 100% manpower, and thus help on unemployment. Albeit not in the best way.
This discussion will soon become a reckless flamewar.
If you knew about German history, you'd likely be very distressed by the ongoing politic events in the USA.
As a German, I am. Fool me once...
Fighting a war that every sane person knew cannot be won beforehand
There already is a french googlish clone, exalead.com. One isn't enough? Now they need a franco-german search engine to?
Exalead is the Search Engine developed by some French researchers, one of whom happens to be Corps des Mines. Corps des Mines is a very high Civil Servant position, open to only the 10 best students from Ecole Polytechnique every year. Since they get after two years (with 25) very high positions in ministries they also tend to have very good contacts with politicians... and are therefore able to influence what an interesting project would be (make a European competitor to Google) and which start-up to choose as backbone of the project (Exalead for exemple)
So to sum up: I believe Exalead to be a very interesting project. But I highly suspect this funding from the French state to not be a mure decision of what Europe needs, but more a very efficient lobbying from Exalead. And Germany might have understood that only now, explaining why they only left the project now.
[tried to mod parent funny, slipped and got "overrated"]
Why would the French and German Governments be interested in a European search engine? Shouldn't it be German and French companies? Unless some other motive was behind this....
Flamebait, hmm? ...
Too soon?
You can't talk about Wikipedia's flaws on Wikipedia
Your never running for public office, I can say that much