ft.com/techblog

The latest quest to create a European search engine rival to Google got underway this week as 13 European companies and research institutes met in Rome to kick off the Pharos project. Among them were names like France Telecom, Circom, the body representing more than 300 of Europe’s regional broadcasters and  Fast, the Norwegian search software company, as well as Germany’s Fraunhofer Institute. The meeting comes only weeks after Europe’s previous attempt at search came apart at the seams. The "Quaero" project was launched last year by the French and German governments explicitly to create a challenger to Google, but just before Christmas the Germans pulled out because of disagreements over the scope of the project. The Germans, who wanted to focus on text-based search, are now pursuing their own "Theseus" project while the French continue with picture-based Quaero. Into this mix wades Pharos, armed with another classical name and €8.5m in funding from the European Commission.

This time there is less hubris. The project partners are very nervous of saying that they are looking for a “Eurogoogle”.

They are at pains to point out that the area of audiovisual search is still wide open for research work. Google’s keyword-based algorithms don’t work particularly well here and Circom at least has a very genuine interest in finding some technology to help it catalogue its vast libraries of TV footage, without millions of man-hours spent manually tagging films.

But there is also some quiet defiance.

Bjorn Olstad, chief technical officer at Fast, says that while not all European governments may be as vocal as France about opposition to Google, there is a growing sense of unease about an over-reliance on any one search technology.

"National governments are beginning to realise the strategic importance of search."

"To do nothing, to not try to develop this technology ourselves would be wrong" agrees Peter Kraewinkels, head of Circom’s Brussels office.

There is also a sense of hope. As Francesco Saverio Nucci, technical head for the project puts it:

"At Google they started with just two PhD students and an idea, so who knows what will happen here."

February 9th, 2007 in Internet | Permalink