Google’s competitor Quaero gets $152 million grant from European Union
16 March, 2008
French president Jacques Chirac has pledged to help fund a new European internet search engine Quaero that competes against Google and Yahoo whose online dominance is being seen as the threat of Anglo-Saxon cultural imperialism.
Jacques Chirac has said, "We're engaged in a global competition for technological supremacy. In France, in Europe, it's our power that's at stake."
Quaero is a French project with the participation of several German partners. The consortium is led by Thomson. Other companies involved in the consortium include France Telecom and Siemens AG.
Quaero is not intended to be a text-based search engine but is mainly meant for multimedia search. The search engine will use techniques for recognizing, transcribing, indexing, and automatic translation of audiovisual documents and it will operate in several languages. There is also mention of automatic recognition and indexing of images.
Quaero in Latin means ‘to seek’. But the size of the fund, a whopping $152 million almost makes you think that it’s probably all the fines that EU is collecting from Microsoft and using it to build a competitor.
The potential benefits of allowing France to fund technology group Thomson SA and 22 other companies working on the Quaero multimedia search project in Europe outweigh any gain Thomson would win over rivals.
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Last I had heard its Nicolas Sarkozy who was the French President and Monsieur Chirac has been long gone... Wish you guys would get atleast the basic facts right before just repurposing a news from somewhere.
Lets hope this is really a revamp and not a backward step!
looking at the shear size of "it's" rivals like Google, Yahoo! the funding of $152 million ssems like a drop in the sea! [:D]
"all the Microsoft fines that EU is collecting is being used to build a competitor."
:))
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