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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."
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.
To put it in historical perspective, Tim took MIME that Einar Stefferud invented (Stef also invented and ran the first mailing list) and HTML (which came indirectly from Brian Reid's PhD thesis, brian also invented the firewall and alta vista) and glommed them all together and invented http. You can see Tim talking about this in comp.infosystems.www in the late 80s early 90s.
Pity there was no internet to shuffle all those usenet articles and mail about. No doubt that would have helped.
Gah.
Need Mercedes parts ?
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.
There isn't much to the internet without http. The only other protocol that comes even close
I know! Those other silly protocols, like SMTP, IMAP4, MIME, POP3, DNS, NTP, FTP, SIP, SNMP, SSH, telnet, RPC, RTSP, TLS/SSL, SOAP, ... nobody uses 'em much.
O lord, bless this thy holy hand grenade, that with it thou mayest blow thine enemies to tiny bits, in thy mercy.