Quaero

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Quaero ( Latin I'm looking for ) was a French project with German participation to fund search engine research . The project, which was initiated in 2005 and last launched in 2008 with EU funding, was finally declared over in December 2013.

history

Since October 2004, the associated with the Quaero project Internet - search engine Exalead , based in Paris ( France ) online. Otherwise the project was in the process of changing political announcements. A search engine under the name Quaero no longer existed at the end of 2006. An already existing public offer of an experimental search engine under this name on the Internet was again restricted to a narrower group of authorized users around the end of 2006. The name Quaero itself was obviously not protected by those involved in the project; Domains of the same name on the Internet are obviously used by uninvolved third parties.

The planned Quaero project was announced by Jacques Chirac and Gerhard Schröder in April 2005 and initiated in early 2006. On April 26, 2006 Jacques Chirac announced a five-year development budget of 250 million euros from the Agence de l'innovation industrial and industry. Originally, the total funding was supposed to be a good 400 million euros, of which 240 million euros should come from the German federal government.

At the first German “IT summit” in Potsdam on December 18, 2006, State Secretary Hartmut Schauerte said that the federal government would withdraw from the Quaero consortium and instead concentrate on the purely German research program under the name “ Theseus ”. However, the French state continued to fund the development project until it ended in 2013.

As a result, only a number of portals and virtual libraries were created - without a connection to Quaero - in order to access the scattered digitized holdings of the libraries, the museums of the archives, in particular the German Digital Library , Europeana and Gallica . The large American providers continued to dominate the search engines.

Motivation and Goals

The background to the Quaero concept was primarily the announcement by the search engine operator Google that it would digitize several million books, mainly from American libraries, and make them available on the World Wide Web as part of Google Book Search . Since this offer includes a full-text search , some representatives of French libraries feared that this action could lead to an irreversible dominance of the English language on the web and that significant information could disappear into the so-called deep web . Above all, the font Google's Challenge (2005, German 2006) by the President of the French National Library Jean-Noël Jeanneney contributed significantly to the discussion at the time. Jeanneney presented a European criticism of the power of the big American search engines, which would undoubtedly prefer Anglo-Saxon culture over other cultures of the world in their offers, and drafted a European alternative to this.

In response, the Quaero project, initiated by French President Jacques Chirac , was supposed to build a search engine technology that had its roots in Europe instead of the USA and which was to be based in particular on the stocks of European libraries to be digitized. An automatic translation of texts into the language of the querying person, as well as image, audio and video searches was also planned. In addition, Quaero should be able to be used on a PC, mobile phone or television.

In addition to Google, Quaero also took the search engine operator Yahoo! and Microsoft targeted. However, it remained unclear until the very end which technology Quaero should be equipped with and how the dominance of American search engine providers should be broken.

However, the German federal government that was initially involved did not see the project goal as creating competition with the American providers, so withdrew from the Quaero project in December 2006 and continued development under its own name Theseus . In July 2007 there were many press releases in the media about the start of the German part of the program.

Organizations involved

economy

Quaero was developed by Thomson (project management), France Telecom and the French search engine operator Exalead . It involved, among other things, the Internet service provider ( Institut National de l'Audiovisuel (INA) ), Jouve, the German Thomson-Brandt GmbH and the Grass Valley Germany GmbH.

Research institutes

The following French and German research institutes were also partners:

literature

  • Markus Dettmer, Marcel Rosenbach : Googled . In: Der Spiegel . 5/2006, p. 94.
  • Jo Bager: European countercurrent . In: c't 10/2006, p. 172ff.
  • Philip E. Ross: What's the Latin for 'Delusional'? . In: IEEE Spectrum 1/2007, pp. 45ff. (Quaero was voted Worst Tech Project 2007 in the Internet sector)

Web links

Project participants

Media on Quaero

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ December 31, 2013: le program Quaero s'achève. Quaero.org, January 18, 2014, accessed July 10, 2014 (French).
  2. ↑ Heise: Quaero continues to give rise to questions (November 23, 2006)
  3. ↑ Computerwoche: Germany is out of Quaero (December 21, 2006)
  4. ↑ Heise: EU Commission approves million dollar aid for Quaero
  5. ↑ Geert Lovink: The Society of Search. Questions or googling . In: Konrad Becker, Felix Stalder (eds.): Deep Search. Politics of Searching Beyond Google . Studienverlag, Innsbruck 2009, ISBN 978-3-8389-0081-0 , p. 53 ff., 59 (licensed edition of the Federal Agency for Civic Education).