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Europe plans Google rival
France and other European countries must meet the global challenge posed by Google and Yahoo! That’s the word from President of France, Jacques Chirac, who fears that all that is not available online runs the risk of being invisible to the world. A rival service - Quaero, Europe's response to Google – needs to be launched. Quaero, a Franco-German project, is being developed by a consortium including - Thomson, France Telecom, and Deutsche Telekom.
The project - whose Latin name means "I seek", will focus on 3 areas: a combined sound, image and video search engine for the general public; professional search applications; and audio-visual "heritage" such as historical footage.
Quaero is all about searches "understanding" audio, images and video, sans written descriptions; and stands test to a new research and development approach driven by the Agency for Industrial Innovation (AII), which is the discovery of Jean Louis Beffa, chairman - glass and ceramics group, Saint-Gobain.
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User Comments (8)
Post a comment| fiziks on January 16, 2006 12:52 PM | come on now, is this really neccessary... google is a godly search engine... is it not available in europe or something?
i don't see the point in doing this... somebody persuade me otherwise
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| barfarf on January 16, 2006 1:03 PM | I wonder what info they fear are being missed by google or yahoo? WIll their search engine filter out USA info and only bring up europe info? You right fizik what is the point?
well at least competition is good for business.
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| MonkeyMan on January 16, 2006 1:05 PM | Well, Europe wants to be the sole power of the world, and money is the way to implement this. As Europe, or the European Union, takes a place beside the United States as a sister superpower, you can expect Europe to challenge the United States in all of its dominating sucessess. Minor things like these, are all part of a bigger picture. Google is without a doubt, a search engine monster, and nothing comes close to it. But it is very possible that Quaero could possibly match google, in all of its features, and search engine capacity. Well its a great idea Europe, but I doubt that this idea will ever come to complete fruition.
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| zachig on January 16, 2006 1:20 PM | That's great, Finally a European Search Engine that will comptete Google. This competition is blessed as it will only make Google (and Quaero) improve.
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| nathanskywalker on January 16, 2006 1:24 PM | Originally posted by zachig:
Yes, competion is good, but i really do not think the Uk stands a chance. google has had many years of experience and seems to know what they are doing. Even if the Uk does come up with something, i'm sure google has a few tricks up it's sleeves...which mabye they will reveal then....
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| exscind on January 16, 2006 2:01 PM | I understand Europe's reasoning to develop Quaero, and I even understand why they lied about "all that is not available online runs the risk of being invisible to the world." I took that comment as because Google is American-based, American-based results will be shown first in the result page of Google. If I am wrong, please correct me. But I believe Google will detect what language of OS the user is operating and perhaps even what region of the world via IP address. When I am on an OS with a different language, Google will prioritize the results in terms of the language first. So really, that's not a problem. I rather Europe to just say "we want an international search engine to compete with Google and Yahoo," at least this would more sense.
Or another interpretation would be Europe's fear of Google filtering out non-English languages, which is also false. I get as many English-language links as I do any other language although Google does prioritize (or tries to) the English links first.
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| Race on January 16, 2006 5:56 PM | The "global challenge of Google and Yahoo"?
Judging from Jacques Chirac's overall track record, could these comments come from his strong desire to not play second fiddle to the U.S.? I can understand where France and Germany may want to create and expand on their own thing. As quoted from the article...." It will not limit itself to being an internet search engine. Apparently Thomson (the consortium) is interested in offering an in-built search facility on the set-top boxes it makes, plus supplying applications to its television and film company clients; Bertelsmann wants to create similar multimedia search facilities on various platforms". I think everyone agrees that competition is always a good thing, and my reaction is the same as I imagine Google's might be.........'Bring It On'....and let the user decide.
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| mentaljedi on January 18, 2006 2:21 PM | Originally posted by nathanskywalker:
I agree. Did you know what one analysit said? It would take MSN 5 yeras to get its survice on par with Google! And by then Goggle would have gone even further! What chance has this european engine got? I am sure that they are worried by a monopoly but Google isn't dangerous unlike Microsoft who thinks the world is its playground... which it probably is...
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