Tobias Escher at the OII

Once upon the time Germany and France agreed on an ambitious project to create a new search engine that would let services such as Google and Yahoo look very old fashioned. Apart from the usual keyword searching, users should be able to use images or even videos as query terms and search for similar content on the web. Also the new technology should be able to transcript and translate audio files and by this way make them searchable.

The project was called “Quaero” (latin for “I seek”), should cost about 1-2 billion Euro and is now dead. Or maybe that puts it too dramatic but at least Germany decided to quit the partnership.

The decision was made by the end of last year. In the future, the two countries will try to develop a search engine on their own. One of the reasons cited are differing opinions about the ultimate goal of the project: While France wants to get a competitive search engine on the market that makes life hard for Google and the like (by incorporating the above technology), Germany is more interested in doing basic research and pioneering new text based search technology and capabilities for the semantic web.

See the International Herald Tribune or, if you know your German, see heise.

I think it will be interesting to see how a state-funded search engine would change the current market. Search is incredibly important to today’s Internet. If Quaero’s successor(s) would really be useful tools that could capture a sufficient share of the search market, that would have a number of implications.

First and foremost, I would assume that a state-funded project like that would have to fulfil certain transparency requirements. Would they have to disclose their algorithms for ranking of search results for example? At the same time, would researchers have a better argument to get hold of collected data (oh, here it is again my old desire …)? I would hope so, but then again, thinking about Airbus, another project funded by EU member states…

What is more, in a discussion about the power of private search companies to rank and even exclude search results (or maybe not to do so), this search engine could considerably change the picture. One could think of an arrangement similar to the broadcasting landscape in Britain and Germany, where a public broadcasting institution (the BBC and ARD/ZDF in Germany) basically are paid for by the taxpayer in order to provide a certain basic level of fairness and objectivity (well, that’s the assumption at least) and therefore take this burden from the private information providers.