It seemed almost farcical, to American eyes anyway, when Jacques Chirac and Gerhard Schr\u00f6der 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.<\/p>\n
Now, less than a year later, the development of the European search engine, called Quaero, is well under way, and as the Economist reports<\/a> 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<\/a> and Exalead<\/a> 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.”<\/p>\n 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:<\/p>\n Quaero will allow users to search using a \u201cquery image\u201d, not just a group of keywords. In a process known as \u201cimage mining\u201d, 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 \u201ckeyword propagation\u201d, 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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It seemed almost farcical, to American eyes anyway, when Jacques Chirac and Gerhard Schr\u00f6der 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-289","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/289","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=289"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/289\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=289"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=289"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=289"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n