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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.'"
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.
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.
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