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.'"

Google Rival?

[Aladrin]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think Google required 2.6 billion ANYTHING to get started. A true competitor for Google will not require a ton of money, but a ton of brainpower. Google is successful because their have a great philosophy and attract the best and brightest. They know how to treat their people (customers and employees both) right and do so.

What would make them think that pooring money into a startup could create what numerous other companies couldn't? (MS, Yahoo, AskJeeves, etc) AskJeeves even had a really great idea (natural language queries) and STILL didn't make it.

Weird project

[4D6963]

I think it was a weird project in the first place, and quite a waste. Trying to make something better than Google would be like trying to catch up with Michael Schumacher while he's got 9 laps of advance on you. Why spend 2 billions on something as useless anyways, we (in France) have a trillion euros debt, an economic situation (among others) that could be better and we're pumping 2 billions into THAT?

Re:Google Rival?

[mumblestheclown]

You'll probably get modded up by all sorts of naive people.

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.

Re:Why not?

[DoktorTomoe]

Just link to google.com?

Because Chirac/Schröder/Merkel think it's a bad idea to just rely on one foreign search engine in a nation that staggers fastly into becoming a fascist rouge state ... *not* linking to google.com is the f***g point

Besides, as a fellow German, I really like Google, and I am convinced that whatever Theseus/Quaero will be, they will fail to a extend that is comparable to the German Autobahn Toll, the ALGII software, or the "Signaturgesetz"...

Re:Google Rival?

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem is that while top university graduates in the US may go to Silicon Valley and form a startup (like the Google founders did), the top university students in France are being groomed for lifetime jobs in civil service (witness the recent protests at attempted labor law reform). They're doing this with a big government program because that's the only way they know how to do things.

Good! Bad! Dead horse, anyway!

[zeromorph]

As much as I don't like the Google monopoly, I felt/feel uncomfortable with a state/big company founded alternative driven by a French/German/European resentment against Google/the US.

So as a person born, raised and up to the Master educated in Germany I like the following statement from the article:

"In Germany I think there was also resistance to the idea of a top-down project driven by governments,"[...]

What I would like to see is a more community developed alternative to Google. And come on, Google is brilliant and huge but it can't be the end of development in the search engine field.

And even Google started small, they just had something new and way better than what was there.

And if it's true

that some of Germany's top research innovators were not motivated to "reinvent the wheel."

Well, they should invent either the engine to the wheel or get rid of the wheel idea and invent wings.

Why is this project wierd?

[Savage-Rabbit]

I think it was a weird project in the first place, and quite a waste. Trying to make something better than Google would be like trying to catch up with Michael Schumacher while he's got 9 laps of advance on you.

That's what analysts and experts said about Boeing, Airbus would never work out. It is also what they said about Microsoft in the mid 90's: Microsoft Windows NT would eventually kill off *nix and and dominate the Server OS market. As it turned out Linux appeared out of a dark corner of the Usenet and ate up most of the market share NT would have done and Unix turned out to be thougher that most people thought. Sometimes state sponsored competitors work out and sometimes a hobby project somebody posted a link to on the Usenet turns into a fiercely competitive product. I don't think the intention with this program was to push Google out of the market. I'd say the EU's intention with this project was more akin to what was done with the Airbus consortium, an attempt to inject some competition by force into a very important market that is more or less monopolized by a single company. Google is becoming dangerously dominant in the search engine budsiness. Google, Yahoo and Microsoft own this market with the latter two losing ground to Google and they are all US based companies. How much do you think it is worth to own the company that controls the search engine that 45-50% of web surfers (and that percentage is steadily climbing) use to find content online? I can see why the EU would think it's worth while to snatch a portion of that action away from the US.

Re:Weird project

[melonman]

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.

Re:Weird project

[Klaus_1250]

I think the majority of that 2 billion would be spend on bureaucracy and moving the project from France to Germany and back every x months.

Re:Weird project

[melonman]

If you check out my profile, you'll see that I'm relatively sympathetic to the French :) But the multipolar thing only makes sense if the alternative actually works.

The Minitel was long promoted by the French as an alternative to the Internet, and, at times, it offered a superior user experience to the Internet, but failure at a national level to understand where the Internet was going has resulted in France falling years behind the US, Germany and the UK, for example, in terms of Internet literacy, especially among business leaders. The same happened with microcomputers, where the promotion of assorted French hardware long after it made sense resulted in a situation today where Microsoft has an even stronger grip than in other countries. And I could write books about how France Télécom's sort-of state monopoly has crippled telecoms in France, and, to some extent, continues to do so.

If there had ever been any hope of the search engine project producing a useful alternative to Google, it would have been interesting, but that was never going to happen because the French elite doesn't "get" the concept of democratisation of knowledge (as the choice of a latin name for the project illustrates).