Germans pull out of European bid to rival Google

[mawilson 2,133]

The war waged by French president Jacques Chirac against “Anglo-Saxon”

cultural imperialism suffered a blow today when the Germans announced

they were pulling out of a rival European search engine to Google.

Earlier this year Mr Chirac announced a series of ambitious technological

projects designed to challenge the global dominance of the US. They included

Quaero, a Franco-German search engine whose name is Latin for “I search”,

but which was swiftly dubbed “Ask Chirac”.

Today German officials confirmed they were abandoning the €400m (£270m)

project. Senior officials in Germany’s economics and technology ministry said

they had decided to dump Quaero because they had been sceptical it would

ever be able to challenge the might of Google and Yahoo!

Cooperation with France had “not been simple,” they said. Asked today what

had gone wrong, a ministry spokeswoman told the Guardian: “There were

disagreements. The French wanted a search engine. We wanted something else.”

Instead, Germany has now decided to launch its own national search engine,

Theseus. Named after the character in Greek mythology who escaped from

the Minotaur’s labyrinth, Theseus would help German internet users navigate

the sometimes treacherous web, the ministry said. It would not be a search

engine as such but an “information and technology service”.

Germany’s decision to snub Quaero is embarrassing for Mr Chirac, who has

been keen to secure his legacy and do something for French pride. The search

engine was supposed to be the first to efficiently sort through audio, images

and video. It would search the growing array of podcasts and videoclips on the

web and deliver the information to computers and mobile phones.

Quaero had been a pet project of Mr Chirac’s for some time. In a speech a year

ago at the Elysée Palace, he spoke of the need to “take up the global challenge

posed by Yahoo! and Google”.

But the project ran into difficulties almost immediately. It has so far not got off

the ground, with the European commission yet to rule on whether the money

originally earmarked for the search engine project by Paris and Berlin amounted

to unfair subsidy.

The French satirical newspaper Le Canard Enchaîné mocked the project’s funding

as paltry in comparison with Microsoft or Google. Mike Lynch, chief executive of

Autonomy, a Cambridge-based search software firm, wrote to the Financial Times

calling the plan “a blatant case of misguided and unnecessary nationalism” and

warned that by the time Quaero was developed the market would have moved on.

The French government has hinted it will continue to develop Quaero without the

Germans. “The aim of Quaero is less to replace Google than to offer new search

possibilities for multimedia, particularly for audio video,” Jean-Luc Gauvain, the

director of France’s Computer Sciences Laboratory for Mechanics and Engineering

Sciences told the German news website Spiegel online.

Source

[mrc 0]

First Freedom Fries, now this. Chirac's ego has to be bruised.

[mawilson 2,133]

Well good fuck1ng luck trying to challenge Google with their measly €400m