Germany Quits EU-Based Search Engine Project 135
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.'"
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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"...
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As if I would trust a german search engine.
With KDE (also german) naming it will probably be named Koogle - no thanks!
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Coincidentially I also happen to be a KDE user (and a critical one). Last time I checked, Lots of KDE work has been done outside of Germany [commit-digest.org]
Re:Why not? (Score:5, Funny)
Ignore this (Score:1)
Nazi Cosmetics?!? (Score:2)
I just got a flashback of a heavily made-up and pucker-lipped Joel Grey singing "Money Makes The World Go 'Round," which has amused me, but I'll probably have that song in my head now for the rest of the week, which is not so amusing.
Nazis? WTF?!?!? (Score:1)
Slightly OT, but... Just wondering wtf Nazis (again) have to do with this..?
Please, tell me - anyone?? 8)
Regards,
- Michicaust
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If you want to equate the two as "oppressive state ideologies", I suppose so. Both Hitler and Mussolini had other ideas about communism and communists in particular -- they tended to end up dead under both regimes. The fasces, which is an axe tied to a bunch of rods, has been a symbol of state authority since Roman days (it's still on some flags I think), but Mussolini drew the colorful metaphor as "corporations" being the rods tie
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Yes, I (and many europeans nowadays) have some very strong opinions about the contemporary US. "Fascist rouge state" is one of the more friendly ones. This is mainly based on the all to similar politics excercised by your political leadership. Lets elaborate on this some more, shall we?
Reichstagsbrand [wikipedia.org] - 9/11 [wikipedia.org]
Ermächtigungsgesetz [wikipedia.org] -
Patriot Act [wikipedia.org]
Internement Camps [wikipedia.org] (note: I speak of camps for political prisoners, not of deat
Ermächtigungsgesetz... (Score:2)
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As much as I disagree with you, I feel I must commend you. Few people are willing to wear their jingoistic ignorance as a badge of honor, and display it to the world. Huzzah, Herr Tomoe, huzzah!
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That "idiot"
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As long as there is oportunity to disagree in a society, we can't call it fascist.
The americans were tired of Clinton, and decided to vote for Bush, then there was 9/11 and faced with the really bad choice of candidate the democrats h
Google Rival? (Score:2, Insightful)
What would make them think that pooring money into a startup could create what numerous other companies couldn't? (MS, Yahoo, AskJeeves, etc) AskJ
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There is a lot of critisism on google about privacy concerns. It is conceivable that Google will not be able to preserve their 'do'nt be evil' image. However, if that would happen I don't think a government built search engine would be a suitable replacement.
Re:Google Rival? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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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.
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Google has very good internationalization features and I'm also looking up information in Eastern European language (Bulgarian) with it.
You have to understand though: the results can only be as good and as much, as is the available content on the lookup topic. You realize the enormous amount of sites o
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One key difficulty for many languages is getting a good stemming algorithm so as to be able to break a sentence down into a group of meanings (thus all the words "jumping", "jumps" and "jumped" all go down to the same basic meaning, "jump", making it far easier to build useful indices). This is an area that has had a lot of work done in English, but I'm told (by someone who knows a lot more about this than I do) that the al
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Re:Google Rival? (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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I'll let it pass (Score:1)
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While in a way that's true, it's not the whole truth. The reforms were in fact an exception to a ludicrous law which made it nearly impossible to fire anyone at all.
What's distinctly French about it is that only France had such a crazy law to start with - though Belgium & Germany run a close second, at least in the public sector.
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I can't agree with you. I have noticed many companies and projects based in France. For example, eXo, VLC and Nuxeo. In contrast, I rarely see projects based in the UK, etc. It's anecdotal, but there seems to be a lot of entrepreneurship.
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Politic Vaporware (Score:1)
- Public funding has not yet started and is not likely to start (french elections, EU commission blocking, etc
- Even though no public $$ has been spent yet, Exalead [exalead.com], a Quaero member, already has a Web search engine, with a few billion pages, and some nice features. (thumbnails and automatic clustering)
Conclusion: this Quaero project is a french politic vaporware, BUT any private french or european company may still have a chance to produce somethin
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Weird project (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
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Of course. This makes a lot more sense than say, creating work for unemployed youths.
Re:Weird project (Score:5, Interesting)
Even here in the EU with all its strange use of money, I suppose that most of those 2 billions would eventually be spent on manpower. So it might actually also help in solving an employment problem.
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Bureaucracy (Score:2)
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This is Keynesian economics and it was proven wrong a long time ago.
In case you're saying that Keynesian economics have been proven flawed, you must be either british or american, because it hasn't, and although a new wave of anti-Keysianism/ultra-libertarianism wiped Keynes out of the scope in certain countries since about 1973, some countries (such as France) are still more Keynesian than anything else and it works out, at least not worse as in ultra-libertarian countries.
Otherwise, please disregard thi
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I suppose that most of those 2 billions would eventually be spent on manpower
In the case of a Google-class search engine, I'd think it would pay a few highly-qualified people and that most would go to the pharaonic amount of hardware needed. If you want to invest in order to help with employment you're better off building a huge bridge or an aircraft carrier.
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Don't get me wrong, I'm happy when the EU levels the playing field for the computer industry against MS (so the others have a fair shot), but that should be it's only job. There are more than enough search engines around. Google is not a monopoly (yet). This is stupid was
Why is this project wierd? (Score:3, Insightful)
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 li
Re:Weird project (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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In of itself, not a bad idea; we're all against monopolies, aren't we? I suppose that's no longer popular now that those terrible, terrible peop
Re:Weird project (Score:4, Insightful)
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).
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I'll agree to say that this project is only one example of misplaced french/europeean pride. As for Chirac, I think he's gonna be the last of the gaulist presidents before a while. Of the two candidates likely to be elected, Sarkozy must be even less gaulist than Ségolène Royal, he's must be more libertarian than Tony Blair, and as you said I think he'd try hard to get closer to the US, I'm also afraid he'd make France flip to the wild side of capitalism and make us rival in capitalistic dementia
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semantic search engine (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/82708/from
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And, frankly, that leap in technology seems a long, long, long way off.
Good! Bad! Dead horse, anyway! (Score:5, Insightful)
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:
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
Well, they should invent either the engine to the wheel or get rid of the wheel idea and invent wings.
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Absolutely. The best alternative, Altavista, was very good, but Google was outstanding. And Altavista had dissolved into a messy "portal" while Google had the clean minimal usability approach that Altavista used to have.
:-)
Build a better search engine and the world will beat a path to your door
All the arguments I ever heard in favour of Quaero sounded extremely misguided big-government oriented. If a decent compet
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However, I disagree with you slightly. While Google hasn't put up any artificial barriers to compe
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And yes I know what I'm talking about. And no you are right it's not monopoly in the strict sense of the word. They are dominating the field with such a power that it is a near monopoly.
Microsoft also has no real monopoly in the De
Gotta "keep up" with Google's Test Search Engine (Score:2)
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If that's where Google is going, I hope there will be an alternative. A UI for search shouldn't require javascript.
EU based? (Score:1, Informative)
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
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What we have here.... is a failure to communicate (Score:4, Interesting)
I've noticed that there are a number of ways that innovative IT projects get done:
1 - Somebody gets an idea, doesn't ask permission, just implements it and it grows
2 - Somebody has an idea, pays others to implement it and it grows, or dies
3 - Somebody has an idea, wastes untold funds on implementing it the wrong way, it dies
4 - Somebody has an idea, government wastes untold funds implementing the wrong idea
5 - variations on one of the above
The trouble with saying that we are going to do something different than what the current market leader has done is that it seldom works if it is supposed to supplant that current leader. Some recent examples? VHS vs. Betamax? HD-DVD vs DVD? Zune vs. iPod?
Google has not quite been iconized to the point that Hoover or Kleenex have been, but trying to replace Google at this point is the same as the Intel vs. AMD issues except that Google is way ahead of anyone else (don't bother pointing out the other available search engines at this point since it is not germane).
Germany and the EU may well demand that there is an EU equal to Google, but it does not follow that this government alternative will become self sustaining. If it can't function without life supporting funds from governments, it will be discontinued at some point.
Even if the technology is mature, there doesn't seem to be any business model to make this EU funded search engine self supporting. When the funds begin to dry up, so will innovation at this new search engine company, and that will signal the end of it. If Google stops innovating, it too will find its own end of life coming. Lack of innovation == lack of relevance in the fast pace of high tech. Governments are notorious for 'lack of innovation' problems.
Whether this is a good idea on Germany's part or not, there doesn't seem to be any historical evidence to indicate that this project will be long lived.
Re:What we have here.... is a failure to communica (Score:2)
If you'd RTFA or even just the
Re:What we have here.... is a failure to communica (Score:2)
you were expecting HD-DVD to overtake DVD sales in less than six months when HDTV has become mass market only in the past year?
Mozilla should bring out a search engine (Score:1)
Then of course they would be evil and in direct competition with Google.
They already have the fox in hell, so might as well make him work
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You mean like "What's related"?
Nutch, anyone?! (Score:1)
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IEEE Spectrum mentioned this project recently (Score:1)
competition != better_product (Score:1)
I also would stress next generation text search (Score:2)
On the other hand, I believe in the utility of next generation text search that clusters documents and allows search for words by word sense (search for "bank" in the sense noun, financial institution - and not return results for "by the bank of the river", "bank the airplane to he right", etc.). Also, support better search within search, etc. I am working on
Exalead (Score:1)
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I'm surprised the French didn't call it Froogle instead.
Exalead is the backbone of the project (Score:1)
Why the government...... (Score:1)
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Linux already exists, so there's no need to make a new OS.
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Too soon? [wikipedia.org]