Pandia argues that there is still room for a European search engine industry, even if all the major companies now are on American hands.

Yesterday we reported on how Microsoft has decided to make Norway the base for its enterprise search efforts. That can hardly be taken as a sign of the European search engine industry dying now, can it?

Total US domination

The fact remains, however, that there is now only one regular European owned web search engine left in Europe: Exalead.

The French search engine is a quality search tool (and the best one on advanced Boolean searching), but the company’s main focus is on enterprise search, and it is not well known in the US.

This means that all the big web search engines — Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft Live — are on American hands.

European concern

At this week’s EU Commission search engine seminar in Seville several of the invited experts was concerned about the dominating position of Google, partly because they feel the company get too much power and is not to be trusted in areas like privacy protection and search result bias, and partly because its “near-monopoly” makes it impossible for European alternatives to succeed.

Google’s representative argued that he no longer considered Google an American company. It is a global company, and the idea of developing a publicly funded “European Google” therefore made no sense to him.

Discussing the future of European search

In a position paper we wrote for the meeting we argue that the globalisation – or rather “Americanisation” — of the European search engine industry requires a rethink of innovation policies.

The traditional argument of supporting R&D and innovation in order to develop European alternatives to a US hegemony makes less sense in a world where more and more of the European companies are acquired by Non-European firms.

Instead of focusing on the development of companies owned and controlled by Europeans, the objective should be to develop Europe based search engine technology clusters that generate innovation in general.

As long as Europe has the required expertise, there will be continued activities in this area on European soil, thus generating economic growth, innovation, and spill-overs in the form of new companies, competences and technologies that can be used elsewhere in the innovation systems.

Click here to download “Is there room for an independent European search engine industry?”

(Position paper for the European Commission JRC Institute for Prospective Technological Studies September 2008)