Updated below: Ah, surprise: French and German developers have split over a plan to develop a rival search engine, but will be continuing in their efforts separately, reports AFP. The French Agency for Industrial Innovation will continue building “Quaero” that would be able to index not only text but also photos and videos. Meawhile, the German-developed engine called “Theseus” would be more focused on analyzing text.
The idea behind Quaero was to break the dominance of U.S.-based search engines, including Google, and the project was estimated to cost about half a billion dollars. Apparently Germany was skeptical it would ever be able to challenge the might of Google and Yahoo.
Updated: IHT: One German advisor to the project said the country backed out because many of the project’s German participants did not want to be associated with an anti-Google project.
Germany and France had initially discussed plans to commit €1 billion to €2 billion, or $1.3 billion to $2.6 billion, over five years to Quaero. The project was to have been paid for by the French and German governments, with contributions from technology companies like Thomson and France Télécom on the west side of the Rhine, and Siemens and Deutsche Telekom to the east.
Related:
—European Search Venture Quaero: Now You See It, Now You Don’t
—French President Backs Eurocentric Search Engine