It seemed almost farcical, to American eyes anyway, when Jacques Chirac and Gerhard Schröder stood up last April and proclaimed that the governments of France and Germany were going to spearhead the creation of a world-class search engine. A bunch of Eurocrats out-Googling the great Google? As if.
Now, less than a year later, the development of the European search engine, called Quaero, is well under way, and as the Economist reports in its new issue, the effort looks anything but farcical. Contributing to the public-private venture are commercial powerhouses like Thomson, Siemens, France Telecom and Deutsche Telekom as well as smaller tech firms like LTU Technologies and Exalead and several top research universities. Billions in government funds are being funneled into the program, “carefully distributed via a complex system of favourable loans, interest-free cash advances, forgivable loans and grants for pre-competitive research, all of which are allowed under international trade rules.”
The effort’s “stunningly ambitious” technological goals, writes the Economist, “show that Quaero is intended to be far more than just another would-be Google, but a leap forward in search-engine technology.” Quaero is, for instance, being designed to allow images and sounds to be used as search terms, in addition to traditional keywords:
Quaero will allow users to search using a “query image”, not just a group of keywords. In a process known as “image mining”, software that recognises shapes and colours will then retrieve still images and video clips that contain images similar to the query image … When Quaero finds an image without a description that matches a properly labelled image, it will append the description from the labelled image to the unlabelled one. This technique, called “keyword propagation”, will enrich the web linguistically … Quaero’s voice-recognition and translation technology … will find audio files – such as political speeches or radio broadcasts – and then automatically transcribe and translate them into a number of European languages. The original audio files can then be found using keyword searches. In addition, speaker-identification software will allow users (via computer microphones) to search the internet for audio clips recorded in their own voices, or those of other speakers.
It might seem like a longshot for a government-led effort to produce something able to compete effectively against what the Economist calls “American free-market techno-capitalism.” And when Quaero is launched, perhaps as early as the end of this year, we may find that it falls short of its goals. But it’s worth remembering that a similar European public-private initiative produced Airbus, which has grown to become the commercial and technological equal of the U.S. giant Boeing. One thing Quaero has going for it is focus: While Google, Yahoo and Microsoft all have complex business interests extending well beyond search, Quaero does not. It has the kind of clean slate that Google had ten years ago when it came to life in a university.
Les Blogs…now this! Hey, Europe you are supposed to be consumers of technology, not producers.
Airbus is rolling out its fantastic new A380. And no US airline can afford it! The early customers are Singapore, BA etc/ Pan Am was the charter for the 747.I hope search engines never go that way.
I think European concerns about privacy will be a significant gating factor. me thinks the Chinese modified, censored Google/Yahoo knock off probably does better in 2 decades.
I’ve seen academic research.. literally dozens if not a couple hundred papers.. on all this type of search: Query by image shape, video querying, audio (and music) querying by content, etc. It all started to be a hot topic about 5-6 years ago, maybe longer.
And I’ve always wondered why Google has never really bothered with any of it. I mean, ANY of it. Its image search is surrounding-text based. As is its video search. No content-based search at all.
The excuse I’ve often heard from them is that they are constantly evaluating all these technologies, but do not want to release any product into the marketplace that is “immature” or not fully developed. I bought that excuse for a while, but then after seeing the dozens of trivial little product releases Google has been doing for the past ~2 years, all of which are not fully developed and remain betas forever, I don’t buy it anymore.
Good for Quaero. I hope they inject some new innovation into the marketplace, and force these American “We do one thing only: Search” companies like Google to start innovating.. heck to start doing search.. again.
“Eurogoogle” verschafft sich Respekt
Die von Jacques Chirac initiierte Euro-Suchmaschine Quaero wird offensichtlich langsam ernst genommen.
Als Reaktion auf einen Artikel im Economist (zahlungspflichtig) hat Nicholas Carr einen durchaus wohlwollenden Kommentar verfasst.
Er würdigt…
@ Vinnie: I’m not entirely sure what you mean by privacy concerns. I mean, sure, there’s the standard “don’t want to give info to the government” stuff, but over in Europe, we have functioning privacy laws and proper checks on government power (in most countries at least, some *cough* Italy *cough* do still struggle to separate media and government).
I’d be more bothered by the whole “one company knows everything you do on the Web (via Gmail, search and analytics) and that info is only one subpoena/shareholder demand away from being used for anything and everything” thing, if I was going to be concerned about privacy.
The US software industry owes much more to the US government that many care to mention.
It is easy to forget that the software programmer profession developed to service the
US government’s desire-need for defence system programmers. (the sage air-defense project) It is well known that the Internet grew out of US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency projects.
Lawrence Lessig and many others argue that the internet’s basic open design principles wouldn’t have been built otherwise.
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency can hardly be described as two guys in a garage or even a free-market institution.
To quote from its web site. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) was established in 1958 as the first U.S. response to the Soviet launching of Sputnik. Since that time DARPA’s mission has been to assure that the U.S. maintains a lead in applying state-of-the-art technology for military capabilities and to prevent technological surprise from her adversaries.” Adam Smith’s invisible hand indeed.
A leading computer industry historian, Martin Campbell-Kelly noted
“The likely prime reason for U.S. software supremacy is a paradoxical one –government support for the industry. The paradox arises from the fact that, although the United States is non-interventionist in principle, in practice it promoted the early industry massively by creating a market for computers and software through programs such as the SAGE project, the Department of Defense’s ADP program, and the NASA program, to mention only the largest..” check out his book Martin Campbell-Kelly, From Airline Reservations to Sonic the Hedgehog: A History of the Software Industry, MIT Press, Cambridge Mass., 2003.
If the goal of the new search engine is to safeguard “European cultural heritage” then a billion € seems cheap.
But building long term technology leadership requires a long term investment in basic and applied research, not just speeches from embattled politicians. The Americans keep telling us (europeans??) we need to learn to be entrepreneurs, but I think we could do with some lessons in Government spending first. Less cows more code.
Anonymous – exactly point you made. Search vendors are picking up some much information on us, what we are looking from, our IP addresses etc. And the US, the Chinese govt are already on to it…and in the US we have not been as worried about that till now…
The fundamental issue in searching the Internet is avoiding spam.
It’s not about providing some set of tech hat tricks, but rather managing the countermeasures to the massive number of people trying to grab onto your results.
I have a really hard time believing the next big search company is going to be powered from the last big enterprise hardware vendors.
It’s not that Europeans can’t do search (Fast seems to work ok), it’s that big old companies and the governments of Europe are unlikely to succeed in this fastest and most volitile of tech spaces.
Airbus, a big iron effort from the later decades of the last century is hardly analogous. You might as well have used the defence of Vienna against the Turks as proof of unity and joint success…
I’ll call it now – DOA.
Chris Tolles
co-founder, dmoz.org
ex-Netscape Search
VP Marketing, Topix.net
The saying goes that knowledge is power. But once the knowledge exists power is exercised by regulating the access to it. There is no other, more powerful entity on earth than Google as nothing else comes close in influencing the flow of information in the internet age. Competition in this field is welcome. Join the discussion on http://IITM.info
I´m just a student of Documentation in the University Carlos III of Madrid.
I have made a web page about european search engine Quaero, for an academic work.
The link is :
http://es.geocities.com/quaerobuscador/
Please,if you have a few minutes, visit the page. You can make a link if you want.
Thank you very much for your time.
I personally will switch to quaero the moment that it is usable. Anoox was a great idea, but it just hasn’t turned into a usable technology for me. I’m hoping to find an alternative to commercial search engines. It is important that our portal to the internet be first as citizens of our planet rather than consumers to be sold something as is the case with Yahoo, google, and MSN search engines. the internet must be more than simply an avenue to comercialism if it will serve as a tool of enlightenment and emancipation. I discuss all this in more depth in:
A Better Upgrade, Not a Faster Throw-Away:
An activist guide to minimizing the social and environmental
impact of computers and reforming the industry
An Activist Guide to Reform the Computer Industry.
http://www.ciber-runa.net/guide/BetterUpgrade–ActivistGuide.html