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

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

[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).

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.

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: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.

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.

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: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.