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.'"

Comments

Google Rival?

[Aladrin]

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.

Re:Google Rival?

[mumblestheclown]

You'll probably get modded up by all sorts of naive people.

However, the fact of the matter is that creating a rival to an established brand CAN be a decent strategy if you see that the established company is either insanely profitable (thus suggseting that there is room for another market entrant), insanely inefficient / bloated despite its success, or geographically underserves some markets.

In this case, #1 and #3 apply pretty well. Google, while great for english speakers, is quite a ways behind for other languages (not necessarily French, but when I use google in Japanese or in eastern-european languages, for example, it's pretty crap).

However, the key often is that since the techology is established and there is a reasonably well established technology out there as to how this sort of thing should work (of course there is room for improvement, but this is less central), such projects require less brilliance, but more a high degree of competence. Such competence costs money. Such products cost money. Off the top of my head, Opodo is a good example of this. They entered a busy market with nothing particularly new. They build a nonspectacular but working system and muscled their way into a decent market share. Sometimes, that's just the way things are done.

Re:Google Rival?

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem is that while top university graduates in the US may go to Silicon Valley and form a startup (like the Google founders did), the top university students in France are being groomed for lifetime jobs in civil service (witness the recent protests at attempted labor law reform). They're doing this with a big government program because that's the only way they know how to do things.

Re:Google Rival?

[Da Fokka]

Its too the point that Google is a cultural icon. So was Altavista, back in the day.

There is a lot of critisism on google about privacy concerns. It is conceivable that Google will not be able to preserve their 'do'nt be evil' image. However, if that would happen I don't think a government built search engine would be a suitable replacement.

Re:Google Rival?

[Richard W.M. Jones]

Searches using traditional chinese characters and Google works just fine in this part of the world.

Actually using Google in Japanese sucks for exactly that reason. If you try search for almost any Japanese name (in Kanji) Google thinks you're trying to write Chinese, even though my browser is set up for Japanese, so it's sending the right Accept-Language headers. I've even had that sitting in Japan, working on a Japanese-bought laptop. So it really is a problem.

Rich.

Re:Google Rival?

[Guppy06]

"the top university students in France are being groomed for lifetime jobs in civil service"

So how much of a stake of companies like Ubisoft is owned by the French government?

"witness the recent protests at attempted labor law reform"

You mean the "reforms" where they made it easier to fire somebody based on their age alone? About the only thing distinctly French I saw there was the fact that they protested instead of presenting legal challenges to a patently discriminatory law.

I've seen these arguments presented an awful lot on Slashdot, but haven't seen much to back it up, not even decent anecdotal evidence of the "I spent some time in France..." variety.

Re:Google Rival?

[suv4x4]

Google, while great for english speakers, is quite a ways behind for other languages (not necessarily French, but when I use google in Japanese or in eastern-european languages, for example, it's pretty crap).

Google has very good internationalization features and I'm also looking up information in Eastern European language (Bulgarian) with it.

You have to understand though: the results can only be as good and as much, as is the available content on the lookup topic. You realize the enormous amount of sites on the Internet are written in English, and a small fraction in all other languages.

You can see the same in Wikipedia where the non-English editions have worse and less content, and lots of common items missing from them. You want too suggest this is fixable not by more people improving on a category, but creating special EU Wikipedia... Well, sorry to burst your bubble about it.

Weird project

[4D6963]

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?

Re:Weird project

[Gnavpot]

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?

            Of course. This makes a lot more sense than say, creating work for unemployed youths. /sarcasm

Even here in the EU with all its strange use of money, I suppose that most of those 2 billions would eventually be spent on manpower. So it might actually also help in solving an employment problem.

Re:Weird project

[melonman]

Because France is in the dying days of "Everything American private industry can do, Europe can do better by lots of public expenditure". This search engine was announced just before or just after Chirac announced that he was going to take on CNN and the BBC by setting up a public sector competitor. Expect that idea to be quietly downscaled too (if only because last I heard the plan was to do most of the broadcasts in French, which does restrict the international market somewhat).

Personally, I think throwing lots of money into high-tech projects potentially makes more sense in job-creation terms than most of the French attempts to create jobs in the recent past (eg paying young people to carry people's suitcases to trains). Except that there is little social mobility and not much more career mobility in France, so you just know that virtually all those involved in the search engine project will be recruited from the French grandes écoles whose graduates don't have an employment problem anyway. It's virtually impossible to end up working in cutting-edge IT in France unless you start working towards that end from the age of 14.

Most of this stuff is now about Chirac trying to build a legacy. He should be history in a few months' time, and I can't see either of his likely successors continuing to behave as if the président is Louis XIV. It's not inconceivable that Sarkozy could even try building bridges towards the US.

Re:Weird project

[Klaus_1250]

I think the majority of that 2 billion would be spend on bureaucracy and moving the project from France to Germany and back every x months.

Re:Weird project

[melonman]

If you check out my profile, you'll see that I'm relatively sympathetic to the French :) But the multipolar thing only makes sense if the alternative actually works.

The Minitel was long promoted by the French as an alternative to the Internet, and, at times, it offered a superior user experience to the Internet, but failure at a national level to understand where the Internet was going has resulted in France falling years behind the US, Germany and the UK, for example, in terms of Internet literacy, especially among business leaders. The same happened with microcomputers, where the promotion of assorted French hardware long after it made sense resulted in a situation today where Microsoft has an even stronger grip than in other countries. And I could write books about how France Télécom's sort-of state monopoly has crippled telecoms in France, and, to some extent, continues to do so.

If there had ever been any hope of the search engine project producing a useful alternative to Google, it would have been interesting, but that was never going to happen because the French elite doesn't "get" the concept of democratisation of knowledge (as the choice of a latin name for the project illustrates).

semantic search engine

[butterberg]

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!):

        http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/82708/from/ rss09

Re:Why not?

[DoktorTomoe]

Just link to google.com? Because Chirac/Schröder/Merkel think it's a bad idea to just rely on one foreign search engine in a nation that staggers fastly into becoming a fascist rouge state ... *not* linking to google.com is the f***g point

Besides, as a fellow German, I really like Google, and I am convinced that whatever Theseus/Quaero will be, they will fail to a extend that is comparable to the German Autobahn Toll, the ALGII software, or the "Signaturgesetz"...

Good! Bad! Dead horse, anyway!

[zeromorph]

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:

"In Germany I think there was also resistance to the idea of a top-down project driven by governments,"[...]

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

that some of Germany's top research innovators were not motivated to "reinvent the wheel."

Well, they should invent either the engine to the wheel or get rid of the wheel idea and invent wings.

Re:Why not?

[Anonymous Coward]

a nation that staggers fastly into becoming a fascist rouge state ... Hey, we may be gradually repressing rights, but we're not THAT big on makeup.

Why is this project wierd?

[Savage-Rabbit]

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. That's what analysts and experts said about Boeing, Airbus would never work out. It is also what they said about Microsoft in the mid 90's: Microsoft Windows NT would eventually kill off *nix and and dominate the Server OS market. As it turned out Linux appeared out of a dark corner of the Usenet and ate up most of the market share NT would have done and Unix turned out to be thougher that most people thought. Sometimes state sponsored competitors work out and sometimes a hobby project somebody posted a link to on the Usenet turns into a fiercely competitive product. I don't think the intention with this program was to push Google out of the market. I'd say the EU's intention with this project was more akin to what was done with the Airbus consortium, an attempt to inject some competition by force into a very important market that is more or less monopolized by a single company. Google is becoming dangerously dominant in the search engine budsiness. Google, Yahoo and Microsoft own this market with the latter two losing ground to Google and they are all US based companies. How much do you think it is worth to own the company that controls the search engine that 45-50% of web surfers (and that percentage is steadily climbing) use to find content online? I can see why the EU would think it's worth while to snatch a portion of that action away from the US.

What we have here.... is a failure to communicate

[zappepcs]

... 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.

Re:Why not?

[DoktorTomoe]

Usually, I have a policy not to feed trolls, but I won't let *this* stand in the open...

Yes, I (and many europeans nowadays) have some very strong opinions about the contemporary US. "Fascist rouge state" is one of the more friendly ones. This is mainly based on the all to similar politics excercised by your political leadership. Lets elaborate on this some more, shall we?

Reichstagsbrand - 9/11
Ermächtigungsgesetz -
Patriot Act
Internement Camps (note: I speak of camps for political prisoners, not of death camps who are a different matter) - Cuba
Fighting a war that every sane person knew cannot be won beforehand - Fighting a war that every sane person knew cannot be won beforehand

Pretty strong similarities, I think. I'll refrain from prognoses when the US will start another genocide...