The EU's competition watchdog approved 99 million euros of French state aid for the search engine project Quaero. The Quaero program was first announced in 2005 by French President Jacque Chirac and involves a consortium of 23 companies, including French technology moguls Thomson as well as a number of public research laboratories and institutions. But the project has not progressed significantly in the last few years due to a lack of funding: costs are estimated to run to 199 million euros in the first five years of the project.The European Commission has announced satisfaction that the Quaero project "brings positive externalities for the community as a whole". EU Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes said, "We are confident that the positive contribution the programme will make to European research will outweigh any distortion of competition caused by the aid."
However, the project has frequently been referred to as an attempt to challenge Google's dominance in the French search market. Quaero certainly seems to be a program with big plans, namely to develop a consumer search engine that will enable you to search through podcasts and radio and TV broadcasts using speech to text transcription and developing a way to make use of content in different languages.
Ever since the first announcement of the Quaero project there has been scepticism about the ability of a divergent collection of companies to implement a cohesive enough strategy to be considered a viable threat to Google. And two years, as we all know, is a long time in the fast moving world of search.
When the project was first announced, it was presented as a Franco-German attempt to compete with the US search engine giants. But it was back in 2006 that some of the German developers left the project to focus their attentions on a "complementary" search engine called Theseus, which had a German aid scheme approved by the Commission last year.
With Google's share of the French search market approaching 90% last summer, according to Alt Search Engines any competitor is going to find it a long, hard slog to provide any serious competition.
