| Searching for a search engine |
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| Written by European network dynamics principal author | |
 Where is quaero going ? In 2005, launched by a franco - german innovative initiative, quaero (latin for 'I search') project never ends to begin. In its origins it was designed to be an european response to Google and Microsoft live search on the already over disputed search engine market. Still in its origins, Qaero was supported, at least partially by some private companies or universities and schools like Thomson, with his german affiliates Thomson-Brandt GmbH and Grass Valley Germany GmbH, France telecom, and some middle sized companies like Jouve et Bertin Technologies, smaller companies like Ealead, Vecsys , Synapse development and LTU technologies. These private companies and consortiums were to work with research organisms like LMSI-CNRS, for public labs coordination, INRIA, Rhenany - Wesphaly technical university, Karlsruhe university, IRCAM, Grenoble Joseph Fourier university, IRIT, ENST. Some other partners were to join the project as it was running its development.In Quaero's blueprints, the engine should have been developped to search and index some multimedia content, such as videos and pictures, in terms of automated indexing and scannings based on multimedia contents, instead as based on tags and descriptions of the contents, based on human writings as what already exists. But unfortunately, since the original announcement for Quaero's launch, nothing seems to ever have emerged out of the boxes. Furthermore, from the industrial point of view, on German side, some major companies as Siemens, SAP or Bertelsmann are abandonning ship, leaving THomson alone at the commands as a project leader. Technically, this project seems to be based more and more on Exalead, search engine technology. Nonetheless, François Bourdoncle, chief executive and Exalead founder wants to pinpoint on the fact that his already existing Exalead engine should integrate some of the technologies developped for Quaero, but that the reverse is not true. An other emerging problem concerning Quaero is that trh Germans seem to withdraw from the project, but for a very understandable reason, they would like to develop their project on their own, the Theseus project, concurrent of Quaero ; that would have been a concurrent of Google.... Neverending story.. For information, Theseus is to focus on semantic search on the senses of words and text. Well, let us say that both parts have divergent points of view, but now what is to happen ?? Quaeo was, if the French position supported by the AII (Agence pour l'Innovation Industrielle - Agency for Industrial Innovation) a public agency that would have had to support and coordinate the project, at least was it at the launching of both the agency and Quaero, one of its children. Nevertheless, after a short 2 year of living, the AII was forced to shut due to the recentring of N. Sarkozy,France's new president policy for innovation on small to middle companies rather than big ones like those in Quaero's range. But, breaking news occured on March 11 th 2008 with Bruxelle's authorization for a french public help of € 99 million. This is a huge amount of money, especially when concerning a search engine that did not proceed in any public search query, more than 3 years after its opening, but a ridiculous budget when compared to Google and Microsoft Live search. This is a budget for a 5 years program of development. Can it be considered as a support for innovative projects ? whereas it does not only need public money but also, and, especially, a way to earn a certain revenue, let us say by selling ads in a way, or another (like do all other major search engines, not to say Google itself with his world reckognized adwords program) Quaero is a born dead project, that did not publish any single web page for now, so why continuing injecting so big amounts of public money in it, one may wonder why public help would not go directly to some working search engines such as Exalead, that IS Working, IS doing searches (and with a quite accurate algorythm) and IS currently employing people as a company, Now.. and not in a 5 years future... Well we will have to wait until March 17, 2008 to know what will happen then. This is supposed to be the official date of opening of Quaero search engine website References: 1) Quaero, the search engine 2) Exalead, the search engine 3) German theseus program        |
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