The EU Commission is up to its usual tricks. Twenty-three European private firms led by electronics firm Thomson are about to get EUR99m ($152m) from the French government to develop a European rival to Google. The European Commission approved the funding because it thinks the research and cultural benefits of the Quaero project will offset the fact that they just handed a ton of cash to Thomson to give it a head start.
There’s more. Last July, the EC cleared a decision by the German government to give EUR120m (USD165m) to the German segment of the Quaero project, named Theseus. Like Quaero, Theseus was conceived in 2005 and is led by firms including Siemens and Deutsche Thomson.
But get this. The investment for Quaero only covers half of the estimated costs of EUR199m (USD306m) over the five first years. And they don’t even own the Quaero.com domain name.
So who does?
A North Carolina-based marketing technology company Quaero, which should just sell up now or threaten the EU with turning Quaero into a porn site or something. Or perhaps a snarky blog about dumb EU Commission investments.
Seriously, someone stop these quangos. Put the money into University PHD In Maths, Physics and Chemistry and let get back to basics.
The EU approved French & German tax payers money can be used, it didn’t give them any money.
I’m not paying for it in the UK.
It may just be as internationally successful as Eurovision!
Well… I’m a french taxpayer, I’m paying for the **** thing, nothing I can do about it… We’re loosers.
@Eric That’s gonna be the most expensive Eurovision ever, and it’s not even going to be half as funny.
Stay tuned, as French government is about to have it’s first ‘new technology’ minister… Now that’s going to be really funny (and humiliating).
I think there are well over a 1,000 alternative search engines out there, see here:
http://www.altsearchengines.com/category/the-top-100-lists/
What I don’t get is what this thing is supposed to do that is any better. Any idea?
Also, provided it was so much better, why wouldn’t this get VC funding?
Actually, they split the thing up – Germans can’t cooperate with the french or so they say… http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaero
Great idea to pick a name that you can easily misspell in an infinite number of ways.
Jens – The simple answer is that no sane VC would ever invest in a generic search engine unless it had stupendous technology created by a genius. Simple funding alone does not guarantee that at all, and any such genius would easily be hired by a startup which could promise him or her an exit/sale which would make them a lot more money than working for a government-owned project where they would be on a simple salary. This is a “Nuclear Fucking Fail”, to borrow a phrase.
The future of France is tourism.
I.e. It is not high tech, I regret.
Mike (and Jens),
I can assure you that sane and very smart VCs would and are investing in generic search startups (don’t know about ’stupendous’ technology, we think ours is good
). Also I don’t think it takes a genius (to invest), more like a ‘black swan’ 
Regarding government funding, Mike is absolutely right, there are many more other drawbacks …
Oh Mike, it gets so much better. See Quaero is supposed to be a multimedia search engine. The EU needs to back that, because it’s not like private companies like Thomson could do it themselves. Oops. Actually, Thomson did it already, bought the Singingfish multimedia search engine from its US owner then sold it back to a US owner — AOL — in 2004.
Do Europeans enjoy wasting money duplicating things other countries have already figured out? First Galileo, the GPS alternative, and now this?
How about coming up with something new and useful.
Oh … with leading companies such as a very innovative Siemens such a project can only get a huge success
Well actually look at it another way….
How much would it cost to buy Google? Hmm $305 seems a bargain.
But ahhh Google is only worth that much ‘cos of its revenue…
How much of that comes from the EU consumer? Could some be kept in Europe?
There is no doubt that search of the internet is also strategic. Is it a good idea that all search engines are in US hands – after all these people have been known to bow to (some) government pressures (see China)…. should we trust these guys forever. Just suppose that some US president wanted to do something absurd like invade some Middle Eastern Country (unlikely I know) against the interests of European nation…. they wouldn’t want to put pressure on us would they???
And ….. thre is justified criticism for Google Books for instance in its anglo-phone centric view of the world… We don’t all have English as our preferred language.
So state subsidy might upset some of the budding entrepreneurs out there…. well actually there are good reasons for this age old tradition… and it is no reason why it needs to be confined to the defence industries.
Suggesting big companies can’t be innovative just goes against history.
Oh and btw… the reason why the figure looks so large in dollars is because the dollar is not quite as mighty as it used to be….
I seriously think that Galileo is different. GPS is cool but also limited. Galileo will be much more advanced. And currently there is NO back-up for GPS. There are lots of alternatives to Google. It makes sense to have at least ONE extra GPS like system as a back-up.
I remember the first time I surfed the net, I used AltaVista and some other local search engines, I remember having to use two or three engines to find what you were looking for, then little Google came along and it took me one search and I was hooked as I found what I looked for in one or two searches, it’s been my start page ever since. I don’t’ know if I would switch
Can a better or just similar search engine which delivers the correct “unbiased” search results be built? With full unbiased and uncensored content and results – not that Google does that.
As an SEM/SEO Company we can bias some of Google’s search results on certain markets and keywords and manipulate the engine to show what we want it to show in the countries we want it to be shown in, now this is not possible on all markets and not as easy as it looks but it’s what we do and it works because of the relative “simplicity” of a search engine, it’s only a database.
The real fun would be if an EU regulated consortium of European ISP’s territory could block access to Google. The ISP’s seem to block more and more these days, so why not block Google?
That would finish Google’s European operations in one go and would cost a lot less. But is it legal and would that make us American? It’s anti-competitive, un-democratic and wrong in so many ways.
But oh what fun we could have! We would have real entrepreneurial competition on who built the best European search engine, now that would bring in innovation on the search engine market and the EU wouldn’t have to pay for innovation and development, it would happen and fast and all the money and results would stay in Europe, and then the next time the States decided to go to war without us, then we wouldn’t have to know we could just block it out.
Or
Bring back free broadband, where the ISP’s decides what to watch and access a bit like TV but who can complain if it’s free? I used to get these AOL cd’s through the door that did that, it was great until you tried uninstalling it and had to throw away your pc or reinstall windows to access the real world.
The ISP’s in the UK are already blocking or slowing down certain sites on purpose and now it looks like they will also monitor and try to manipulate traffic, so why not? Let them make if free and biased and censored like the papers we are put in our hands every morning on the way to work…
Show me a real unbiased democratic uncensored search engine that isn’t run on a complete random generator which indexes pages before they are made… until then let’s use what we got and like with everything else we read, make up our own mind on the objectiveness of the content.
If the EU commission want to compete and make the EU competitive, they should focus on getting free university access for all EU citizens, like it is in the Scandinavian countries, then let the competition begin on new levels much higher than that of simple text based searching, databasing and categorising and ranking of text and showing a few adverts..
After all search is just a step on the path to finding the right results and is it not the results that really counts?
the reason why the figure looks so large in dollars is because the dollar is not quite as mighty as it used to be….
it can’t be true! i’ve been shocked.
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