By Pandia Guest Writer Lars Våge

The German publisher Heise reports that the European search engine project Quaero will receive some 400 million Euro (US$ 508 million) in new funding from the German and French governments and industry.

Given the ambitious objectives of the project, the funding is probably needed.

In the article Wolfgang Wahlster, the director of DFKI (Deutsche Forschungszentrum für Künstliche Intelligenz/ The German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence), is quoted as saying that Quaero is not only to deliver lists of search results. The service is also to give precise answers to questions.

Furthermore, the search engine will not only include web pages and scanned books, but also multimedia content like music and video.

Quaero is looking at various indexing techniques as social tagging and bookmarking, as well as the more traditional cataloging methodology used by the Semantic Web Project (the Semantic Web makes use of standards, markup languages and related processing tools for sorting web pages).

Social tagging is considered to be too chaotic by the Quaero teams, while the Semantic Web approach is found too top-down. Hence the idea is perhaps to improve and combine them both.

In one pilot study the idea is apparently to develop an automatic or semi-automatic method for adding semantic metadata to web content. As an example Wahlster mentions the use of image analysis. It is important to solve ambiguities like the tagging of a picture of a car with the word “Golf” (that’s a VW Rabbit for our American readers) so that the picture doesn’t show up in search results for a query related to the golf sport.

The German part of the project will, for instance, develop user interfaces capable of an intelligent dialogue between the search engine and the user. Different visualisation techniques will also be considered.

Wahlster does not like the Anti-Google image applied to Quaero in various articles (an image that French President Jacques Chirac and various French supporters probably find useful). According to Wahlster Google is stuck in the Web1.0 age whereas Quaero is not.

Besides Wahlster’s own institution, DFKI, German organisations and companies like the Fraunhofer Society, Siemens, SAP and Deutsche Bibliothek are involved. Fraunhofer, which owns the MP3 patent, is the leading organization for applied research in Europe with a staff of some 12400 people.

For more information see: 400 Millionen Euro für europäische Suchmaschine Quaero (heise online - in German).

See also our articles: The multimedia search engine Quaero, Europe’s answer to Google
European search engine alliance to challenge Google

This article was originally published in Internetbrus, a Swedish blog on search engines and Internet searching that has been online since early 2001. It is written for both searchers and educators.