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.'"

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 [heise.de]

Re:Google Rival?

[Richard W.M. Jones]

Searches using traditional chinese characters and Google works just fine in this part of the world.

Actually using Google in Japanese sucks for exactly that reason. If you try search for almost any Japanese name (in Kanji) Google thinks you're trying to write Chinese, even though my browser is set up for Japanese, so it's sending the right Accept-Language headers. I've even had that sitting in Japan, working on a Japanese-bought laptop. So it really is a problem.

Rich.

EU based?

[Anonymous Coward]

Pardon my ignorance, but how exactly is this project 'EU based'?
A project based in Europe, yes, but as far as I can tell only the Germans and French are involved.
According to the article, the EU isn't funding this project.
As for a geographical reason to call it EU based..
The EU has 27 member states so it sounds a bit silly.
You don't call a British project 'EU based', do you?
Besides, it suggests a kind of pan-European cooperation which just isn't there...
Well, besides the obvious Franco-German axis, but they're just trying too hard with their whole zomfg America Sucks!!1 angle /just my 2 eurocents

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.