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To anybody left wondering what ever happened to Quaero - the Franco-German Internet search engine that was scheduled to be officially launched in early 2006 - it appears to have taken yet another two steps backwards into Franco-French.

At an IT Summit in Potsdam the German Economics minister, Hartmut Schauerte announced that the German Government is pulling out of the joint venture. “The co-operation is at an end and although we won’t be cutting all ties, the project will in future be a national German project with the political and economic aims of this summit”.

The Quaero project had large ambitions from the start, touting itself as not just a text-based search engine but one that “will use techniques for recognizing, transcribing, indexing, and automatic translation of audiovisual documents operating in several languages. There was also mention of automatic recognition and indexing of images”. Wikipedia

It was said to be in France that the research for this relatively new field of ‘image mining’ was taking place, although according to Hartmut Schauerte the French were more interested in pursuing a ‘conventional search engine’ whereas the German Government expressly did not want to go into direct competition with Google and others and wanted to concentrate more on the development of the semantic web. To pursue this aim the German Government will be creating a new project under the name of ‘Theseus’.

via Hiese.de & MutiligualSearch

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