It has emerged however that Germany have now withdrawn from the £270m project after senior officials in the German economics & technology ministry admitted that they had doubts about ever being able to challenge the might of Google and Yahoo! A spokesman for the German ministry said:"The consortium between the German and French governments is over... There were disagreements. The French wanted a search engine. We wanted something else"
Project Quaero involves a large number of well-known institutions and companies including Thomson, Siemens AG and France Telecom among others. The vision for the project was for the French to do the image-search research while Germany looked after the video clip & sound media searches, along with translation into text and other languages. Unlike most traditional search engines, Quaero is not based on text but is mainly meant for multimedia searching. Quaero will utilize techniques for the recognition, transcribing, indexing and automatic translation of audiovisual documents and will operate in several different languages. There has also been mention of automatic recognition and indexing of images, but it is unclear exactly how this will work.
The French government has hinted that it will continue with the project nevertheless and will look to develop Quaero without the Germans. Germany meanwhile, has decided to launch its own national search engine, Theseus, at an estimated cost of 1.2billion Euros. It is claimed that this new project, named after the mythological Greek hero who escaped the Minotaur's labyrinth would help German internet users to "navigate the sometimes treacherous web." The ministry added that Theseus would not be a search-engine as such but an "information and technology service."
Germany's decision to withdraw from Quaero will no doubt be seen as an embarrassment for the French president who had coveted the notion of Quaero for some time. The project was hoped to become the landmark of his tenure and was supposed to be the first search engine to efficiently sort audio, images and video; searching the growing array of podcasts and video clips on the internet and delivering the information to computers, mobile phones and PDAs. At a speech he gave a year ago at the Elysee Palace, he spoke for the need to "take up the global challenge posed by Google and Yahoo!".
However, the project hit difficulties almost straight away and the European commission has yet to rule on whether the money that had originally earmarked for the project amounted to 'unfair subsidy', prompting French satirical newspaper Le Canard Enchaine to ridicule the project's funding as being 'paltry' compared with Microsoft or Google.
