French president Jacques Chirac has pledged to help fund a new European internet search engine to rival Google and Yahoo as he railed against what he sees as the threat of Anglo-Saxon cultural imperialism.

He intends to provide forgivable loans to a Franco-German “multimedia search engine for the internet” being developed by French group Thomson and Deutsche Telekom.

Dubbed “Project Quaero”, from the Latin word meaning “to seek”, the programme will be fleshed out in more detail next month. Much of the content is expected to be European.