European initiative Quaero to take on Google

European initiative Quaero to take on Google

After Japan, it is the turn of Europe to go offensive on the search engine giants Google. The President of France, Jacques Chirac took the initiative when he said in his recent New Year address that Europe need to face the challenge posed to it by American tech companies like Google and Yahoo!

He also claimed that they cannot ignore the fact that information available online needs to be accessible and it is important for them to be a player in the online searching field. He lent his support to the project named Quaero, Europe’s response to Google. This project is being developed by a group consisting of Thomson, France Telecom, and Deutsche Telekom.

Quaero means ‘I seek’ in Latin and would focus on three specific areas namely, a search engine for general public, professional services for corporate entities and audio-visual “heritage” such as historical footage. The developers behind this project claims that the project is all about understanding multimedia content on the internet.

They also claim that if the project is successfully implemented as per their plans, it would be the first “truly multimedia” search engine and would be powerful enough to compete with Google on the internet.