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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.
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.
Well, you probably haven't heard of most of the smaller, less glamorous projects funded by the European Commission. Some excerpts from descriptions of websites I've built for a couple of 'em, all in a particular subsection of industry:
"Innovative Integrated Energy Efficiency Solutions for Railway Rolling Stock, Rail Infrastructure and Train Operation."
"... will concentrate on fixed-formation passenger trains and universal locomotives capable of 200 km/h or more."
"... aims to integrate a fragmented research landscape, promote the railways' contribution to sustainable development and improve the competitiveness and economic stability of the European rail sector."
"Providing grounds for the establishment of 15,000 km of new and existing [railway] lines predominantly dedicated to freight."
"Develop modelling tools to improve the understanding of rail vehicles and passenger dynamics, particularly with respect to crash behaviour."
As you can see, there's probably about fifty million plus Euros of Commission money right there, quite obviously going into producing blatant knock-offs of American technological innovations.
Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?
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.
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.
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