Germany pulls out of the European Quaero search engine project and sets up its own. Fast leads alternative development project.

Pandia is a European site, so we are allowed to say things about Europe our American friends cannot get away with. For instance: Why is it that the French do not “get it” when it comes to American capitalism?

French-American rivalry

French policy makers tend to think of the American “military-industrial complex” as a threat to European culture and welfare, but is at the same time mesmerized by American success.

Because of this they would like to use European cooperation to put up alternatives to American products and services, saving not only the French language and European culture, but also ensuring the development of European industry.

A European alternative to Google and Yahoo?

Google is, of course, considered a threat, and there is therefore — according to this line of thinking — a need for a European answer to Google. The answer has been, apparently, the publicly supported French-German multimedia search engine Quaero.

The project involves a large number of institutions and companies including Thomson, France Télécom, Siemens AG , Thales, Bertin Technologies, Exalead, Inra, CNRS, Clips Imag, RWTH Aachen, the University of Karlsruhe and others.

The idea was to let the French do the image-search research, while Germany took care of voice clip and sound media searches and the subsequent translation into text and other languages.

(See Lars Våge’s articled EUR 400 million to the European search engine Quaero and The multimedia search engine Quaero, Europe’s answer to Google here at Pandia for more).

The Germans have had enough

Now Deutsche Welle reports that Germany is leaving the project.

“We will still see cooperation, but in another form, such as work groups,” a spokesman for Germany’s economics ministry says. “The consortium between the German and French governments is over.”

Instead the Germans will develop a parallel project called Theseus. The German government will set aside 1.2 billion Euros (US$1.57 billion) for this purpose.

It is hard to find a unified explanation for the failure of collaboration. Some quote personal differences between project managers, while others argue that the Germans were fed up with the French need to develop a Google killer. The Germans were more interested in develop a supplementary services focused on the semantic web, apparently.

Science push, market pull

Another reason may simply be that science driven, technology push, initiatives of this kind will face difficulties if they are not sufficiently anchored in a clear market strategy. Some European policy makers (and many Americans as well, we should add) tend to believe that the fact that Google’s technology was born in a university, means that search engine development is purely a technical affair, best left to scientists and engineers.

But Google is not a purely science driven adventure. The company is, rather, the end result of a good marriage between science on the one hand and a deep understanding of economics and markets on the other. American venture capitalists know this, which is why they insist on having a strong say in the running of the companies they are funding.

It seems parts of the French government has failed to understand this, focusing mainly on the science part, and — on top of that — turning this into a weapon to be used in trans-Atlantic political rivalry. That has been a big mistake.

Fast and the Pharos project

It should also be noted that there is no need for a European inferiority complex in the search engine arena. Norwegian Fast Search & Transfer actually did develop a search engine delivering search results of a quality close or equal to Google’s called AlltheWeb.

Unfortunately Fast found it hard to make AlltheWeb commercially successful and sold AlltheWeb to Yahoo!

Yahoo! on its side decided to discontinue the AlltheWeb technology, opting for the inferior Inktomi search engine instead (probably because the company found it easier to handle an American based group of engineers and developers than one located at the other side of the globe).

Fast is still around, however. It is mainly focusing on the enterprise search scene, but is also powering the Scandinavian Sesam search engine. It is to lead a Centre for Research-based Innovation funded by the Research Council of Norway. The center will seek to identify opportunities and develop the next generation’s search engines that can extract user-friendly information from vast and complex amounts of data.

Fast is also receiving support from the European Union, as the leader of a consortium of 13 partners. “The Platform for Search of Audiovisual Resources Across Online Spaces” — the PHAROS project — will apparently build a next-generation audiovisual search platform.

“With the high growth rate of multimedia content production, increasing broadband access, convergence of devices and users’ sophistication level rapidly rising, it is essential to drive the development of advanced multimedia search capabilities further,” says John M. Lervik, CEO of Fast.”

Hm. This sounds very much like what pats of the Quaero project set out to do. However, this project is run by a company that knows the market intimately and is not influenced by French Americo-phobia. That may make a difference.

French companies are on board, though. Here are all the partners:

Engineering Ingegneria Informatica SpA, France Telecom, L3S Research Centre at the University of Hannover, Fraunhofer Institute for Digital Media Technology, Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Knowledge Media Institute of The Open University, Fundació Barcelona Media Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Technical Research Centre of Finland, Circom Regional, Metaware SpA, Web Model, SAIL LABS Technology and Fast.