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EU Google Competitor Project Gets Aid Worth $166 Million
mernil wrote with the news that the EU Commission has given the go-ahead to provide funding for Germany's search engine project, called Theseus. Early this year we discussed Germany's withdrawal from the French project Quaero. From the outside, it looks like the EU Commission is unwilling to put all its eggs in one basket, funding the German project to the tune of 120 million euro, or $US 166 million. Dow Jones reports: "The aim is to develop new search technologies for the next generation Internet, including 'semantic technologies which try to recognize the meaning of content and place it in its proper context.' The semantic Web has been considered the next evolution of the Internet at least since Tim Berners-Lee, widely considered a creator of the current version of the Internet, published an article describing it in 2001. In theory, a semantic Web could receive a user request for information about fishing, for example, and automatically narrow the results according to the user's individual needs rather than blanket the user with pages related to numerous aspects of fishing. The Commission's funding approval Thursday immediately sparked talk of building a potential European challenger to Web search leader Google Inc."
"since Tim Berners-Lee, widely considered a creator of the current version of the Internet"
Yeah, right.
Need Mercedes parts ?
Instead of big government bureaucracy, trying to force a Google competitor from the top down, the EU should be seeding promising European startups. The next Google is probably not going to look anything like Google, and you aren't going to find it with this style of funding.
See also:
The more you know, the less you understand.
Those commercial and non-free search engines are nothing new. Google, Yahoo, and also government-supported proprietary search engines like Theseus are all the same.
I am looking forward to see if free search engines such as Wikia Search will succeed. They are really something new and I can only wish their best.
It's got to be a fun name. "Yahoo!" was a fun name. "Google" is a fun name. "Eureka" would be a fun and successful name... unfortunately, the company's products suck... (but they are supposed to... it's a vacuum cleaner company.) They should pick a name like that. Theseus makes people think of "Thesaurus" and c'mon! Who wants to use that?
I suggested "communism." You know, the web, people working together, global village, all that loveliness. But apparently it has some negative conitations from before my time. Oh well.
The domain http://www.theseus.com/ takes you to a page with the banner "global sensor networks. surveillance . tracking . control".
I banale Balmer Chair throwing joke install windows Vista!
Cause we all know Al Gore invented it!! :-)
Si vis pacem, para bellum! For evil to succeed good men need only do nothing!
A German search engine would have green blood in all the image searches and searches on anything remotely connected with WW2 or the Nazis would be verboten.
What a joke!
on the one hand, a new window into what's out there is good.
on the other hand, will a gov't funded search engine "overlook" material said gov't doesn't want you to find?
on the gripping hand, "Tim Berners Lee vs Al Gore for the undisputed Inventor of the Internet!"
The one where you could find useful search results, and not have to wade through page after page of spammed ads and camped domains pretending to be a legitimate site.
In the meantime, here's a message from our sponsors http://www.gisol.ca/.
I have NO idea what Google has recently done, but their search now completely blows. They seemed to have trimmed their database, but FAR to aggressively. I have been noticing a lot of searches that should bring up thousands of pages, bring back maybe a couple, if any. Here is my most recent example (about a Thinstall variable):
M ode - returns 8 hits. The most useful link off the search is https://thinstall.com/help/index.php?attributes_in i2.htm. In itself, this isn't very useful, but the link on the page - https://thinstall.com/help/index.php?isolationmode s.htm is what I would be looking for... but if you notice, this is NOT one of the 8 links google returns.
i onMode returns NOTHING. Not only did I used to get results from groups for this search, but I have a hard time believing that no one in the history of Thinstall asked a relevent question on a news group about this variable.
http://www.google.com/search?q=DirectoryIsolation
Also, http://groups.google.com/groups?q=DirectoryIsolat
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
For those of you interested in the origins of the name, wikipedia refers to him as a 'founder-hero'.
-Grey
Silver Clipboard: Time Management Tips
I think you underestimate the deep need to categorize in the German psyche.
The Semiotic web is going to be an important compliment to Google's global 'secretarial' services - I can't wait!
Ah well, just another few hundred millions down the drain. It's only tax money, including mine.
That whatever is developed publically or privately in the US they have to develop a competitor? What about Galileo - the EU's competition to GPS? Yeah that's crashed and burned and it barely got off the ground. Andy why again? Seems that if you want to play along you should cooperate instead of wasting money trying to catch up with dubious projects of questionable benefit.
This is a ridiculous waste of taxpayer money, and a good demonstration of all that is wrong with beurocratic top-down European Union thinking (and I speak as a European).
If you really want to promote innovation, then stop wasting taxpayer money on this type of crap and lower corporate taxes, encouraging an environment where the fit will thrive and the unfit will die.
Let the user become the crawler- and do not eliminate the search giants (just don't rely on them completely). Already I sort of operate like a (slow) crawler with my queues of links to read, bookmarks (be weary- big load) and indexing those very interesting or important pages, sharing related tidbits, etc. Just feels like the natural extension, though I am sure that many people will want to stick with traditional GUIs and "back/forward" habits. There is also some interesting discussion in ATLAS-L re: future search infrastructures. So, in the spirit of promoting development in this area, linkage:
* Grub article (now defunct)- was distributed peer-to-peer crawler. (see also)
* Boitho, another distributed crawler
* YaCy- another peer-to-peer crawler
* How to build a web spider
* C++ web crawler lib
* LibWWW (perl)
* W3C's WebBot
* The Internet Archive's Heritrix crawler
* WebSPHINX- customizable crawler
Somehow, this is like an extension of surfraw. I imagine that soon enough we will start up an open source crawler-browsing hybrid software package, though have been surprised that nothing like it has popped up yet- it's (usually) the way of the programmer to make sure that he has the ability to do what the giants are doing. Maybe we have all been collectively blinded by graphical web browsers (IE, Firefox, Opera, etc.) and "click-click-click" thinkware?
Of course, google didn't come from government subsidies, it came from a few bright guys who made a startup and made it succeed by their hard work and sweat.
The lesson Europe needs to learn is that the way to compete with the USA is not by trying to copy everything the USA does (google, GPS systems, operating systems, etc etc) but with government funding. The way to beat them is to innovate and make brand new things, made by the people who are passionate about doing something new and will pour their hearts and souls into it. That's why the Intel, Google, and Microsoft started in the USA, and why the European knockoffs all failed. You can't drive it from the top down: you have to let it grow from the bottom up. As soon as Europe learns this, there will be nothing to stop it.
Damn you, Slashdot. That should read "I am [a member of the group I'm criticising]".
Send email from the afterlife! Write your e-will at Dead Man's Switch.
This project is not waste of money nor is usually the normal R&D funds, benefits and grants given by the EU and member states. The money is intended to lower the risk on venturing into a totally new industry or on a new technology. Basically the idea is to put some public funding to encourage the private money to follow and get the ball running and as the ball keeps on rolling the society gets back it's initial funding via new firms, via new employment, via increased revenues and so on. These activities are very normal to any industrialized nation: Japanese developed their industries together with their government (Ministry of International Trade and Industry); the US is also heavily involved in funding new technology and industries via heavy R&D programs in the military; and the China and Russia all are doing the same thing. Compared to previous examples, the EU and members states fund too little new development, and that's a problem.
On a note I think that Theseus project will be very interesting and hopefully very rewarding. It's especially interesting as the main firms in it will be SAP and Siemens. SAPs systems are basically running in every major corporation and are responsible for lots of information handling. Siemens too has it's hands on very interesting technology, especially in industrial sectors. If by this project they technologies that allow SAP, Siemens and other vendors to get more information and make their systems more intelligent, the rewards to them and to the society would be quite large.
On a different note, a good example of how governments can help their booming corporations to succeeds can be found here from Finland. I would say that with out Finnish governments help by starting and guiding research projects, university programs, student intake, granting cheap development loans, reviewing tax laws and etc.. there wouldn't be such a enormous success as Nokia is today. That's just a one example. We need public money also, we do also need private money, but to keep up with the USA, Japan, China and other, we here in the Europe have to use public funding too to make sure European industries and firms will be successful in international competition.
Survey research tool for commercial and scientific use
...to see that simple, pure, unadulterated nationalism still thrives in the EU.
Certainly, it may have been transferred from old fashioned regionalisms, but from Galileo, to Qaero, to Theseus, these are all just continuing examples of the European Union seeing something that exists in the free market, is successful and, because they are American, they ipso facto need to be reproduced "by us".
Hilarious, and pathetic.
-Styopa
...use Google... uh...
Completely fascinating that so many posters seem to think the corporate sector is already providing and is the only possible way to provide the "best of all possible [search] worlds" - completely laughable given how badly every single one of the existing ad-supported, hyper-commercialized options leeching away at our souls simply suck the bleeding ass of all things .com - a TLD that didn't even exist back when the Internet actually held useful information that could be easily found and used via a simple subject index - which is exactly how Yahoo started, iirc.
... YOU are the product Google, Yahoo, et al are selling to their real users - their corporate client base.
Semantic search, even if poorly implmented, could only be an improvement over the lame excuses these corporate clowns foist off on us as nothing more than baits and lures for their their advertising clients
Who's got the pool on when GOOG drops below $500?
"The Internet is made of cats."
I agree with your ultimate conclusion that this won't work, but your comment is quite unbalanced and misleading. In reality, the process for this gov't funding of research looks reasonable at the start (the funding involves partnership with private companies) and actually needs to be different from VC funding to support cross-organization collaboration (information sharing) and success. After all, government funded research is better for setting groundwork and infrastructure simply because people are encouraged (via policies and programs) to share information. Gov't thus provides a different type of competitive enivronment that is sometimes better than VC/private capital and sometimes complementary--Atomic bomb project? Human Genome Project? Gore's failed new generation of vehicles initiative (PNGV)? I wish that last one had succeeded...US-CAR is on record as saying 50 mpg was "somewhat reasonable" for us autos by 2000. And btw, it failed due to management issues, not innovation. And none of these items are startups--they are all Programs and thus pooled risk.
Thus you seem to be misleading people by saying "have a VC startup mentality." Many many many startups come from government funding of research institutions and projects. Without universities and pilot projects (from non-profit foundations and the defense industry) we would be short on innovation in America and long on AT&T-esque market control. Furthermore, the world relies on starter funding and brain power from university research grants...and _that_ ends up being coupled with private financing. So VC/angel funding is often coupled with or _second_ to government financing. Call it the research industrial complex, if you wish.
As to success/failure, many startups fail -- because of timing and poor management. Programs tend to be over budget and behind but eventually succeed in pushing the private sector along or developing new technology. In this case, I think the timing is fine, but management seems shaky from the get-go. Like gore's project, this one appears to be a grand idea without checks in place to assure progress and repercussions for failures. In addition, it doesn't seem to have a compelling need to match the huge expense...or a long list of smaller research groups to carry the innovative weight. I see SAP and Germany and I think "junket" and "pork barrel." As such, this seems like a junket--gore's project actually accomplished technology improvements in numerous areas because it relied on lots of smaller contracts and had compelling need due to his knowledge of the market crunch that would be occurring about now, the situation with manufacturers, and global warming. Again, this scream junket.
To review, I agree with you that this is a stupid project. But disagree that a VC mentality has anything to do with it. A "VC mentality", without a nod to regular gov't support, ignores how projects start and ignores that this one will fail or only provide limited new technology due to poor management and limited contract diversity--not due to funding source. So you are right, but for the wrong reasons.
You're fucking kidding me, right?
-Anonymous Coward
Especially that idiot named Linus trying to reproduce something made by a good American company! What a pathetic loser.
"are all just continuing examples of the European Union seeing something that exists in the free market, is successful and, because they are American, they ipso facto need to be reproduced "by us".
Hilarious, and pathetic."
It's actually called self reliance. It's a bit of a security risk trusting both your nation's operating systems and internet searches to foreign companies, especially when you can count on so many searches going straight through NSA. There's an espionage risk in doing so, even if only industrial.
I suppose it's also hilarious and pathetic that the US government subsidizes steel and the arms industry. I suppose they should just let the Chinese produce all their steel for them, let Russia build her airplanes and if they ever act antagonistically, just draft an army of hairdressers and plumbers from your wonderful "service economy" to start building your army's infrastructure from scratch. An infrastructure that probably takes as long as most wars to build.
In this day and age, internet search is also a national security issue for any country. Trusting to the free market would be like playing an RTS where you have fog of war on, and everyone else has fog of war off.
For some reason most libertarians don't seem to understand that when they say a government should provide police, courts and military, that last one is a slippery slope. It's not just a bunch of men with guns. To fight a war you need energy security, infrastructure to produce the materiel for an army, natural resources to build the materiel, food to feed the army, and some sort of parity with the weapons of your nation's competitors including information weapons of traffic analysis, crypto, etc. So, to have an effective military you start heading down the road to a planned economy before you can even say "Milton Friedman".
If I have seen further it is by stealing the Intellectual Property of giants.
Its unlikely that Theseus or any truly semantic search company will operate in the US and some non-us countries as the scalable indexing, image feature extraction, mediation between ontologies and other foundation patents are owned by US based Jarg Corporation.
I should let this lie but I can't.
The entire point of interdependence is to prevent conflict. If we know we can't fight a war without them, we sure won't fight it with them.
The goal is to have fewer wars, and spend more time getting everyone's standard of living up to scratch.
Self reliance is the road to poverty.
I have no trouble with European tax payers financing doomed, and redundant projects that don't service any existing need. I would just hope that European's would have a problem with it.
I would rather be ashes than dust!
Which muppet decided to tag this socialist?
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
Although I believe we have our american friends to thank for the phrase "pwned".