by Playfuls Staff |
16th January 2006
We’ve told you in a
previous article about the French and German intentions of launching a brand new search engine, called Quaero, that would represent the European response to the search giants from US, Google, Yahoo and MSN. But is seems that, in this case, even if there’s the will, the way is still unknown.[more]
Thus, according to Forbes, the Franco-German project – whose Latin name, meaning “I seek”, has been chosen so as not to offend either country’s linguistic sensibilities – will focus on three areas: a combined sound, image and video search engine for the general public, professional search applications and audio-visual “heritage” such as historical footage.
The project found itself in the spotlight following remarks last week by French President Jacques Chirac. "We must take up the challenge posed by the American giants Google and Yahoo," Chirac said, discussing the importance of technology to Europe's economy. "For that, we will launch a European search engine, Quaero."
His remarks prompted some commentators to describe Quaero as Europe's next Airbus, the aircraft maker that competes with Boeing. There was talk of a coming out party next month where Quaero's goals would be described in more detail, although a spokeswoman for the project said no event has been planned.
The scrutiny was apparently too much for Thomson's (the French giant leading the project) chairman, Frank Dangeard, who imposed a "news blackout" Thursday on Thomson's media staff and ordered the project's website to be taken offline. "There's been a lot of noise and our chairman decided we should stop making any comments until a more official press event," said Thomson spokesman Philippe Paban.
However, nobody really knows how this new product will actually look like, because, according to the Franco-German Economic Cooperation Working Group, Quaero appears not to be a single product but rather a project to develop search and content management technologies for end users, media companies and service providers, to address the growing volume of digital multimedia content on the web. They will include technologies for annotating and searching all kinds of content, including video and text, and even translating results into other languages.
"The growth in the quantity of information accessible in diverse forms such as audio and video libraries, and soon even 3-D reconstructions of scenes, in addition to the text and still images already accessible on the web, will be of no use unless there are tools to search and select this information, either over public networks or in personal databanks," the working group said.
The consortium's members hope to license the technologies for use in products and services, according to Thomson's Quaero site, which is still cached by Google. The other participants include France Télécom, Deutsche Telekom, the Exalead search engine, machine translation specialist Bertin Technologies, and France's National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Control (INRIA), which will develop image processing technologies.
The main advances will include technologies that automatically transcribe, index and translate audio and video content, according to the Franco-German Working Group. They will also include techniques for long-term storage of vast amounts of data, and content protection technologies such as watermarking and digital signatures.
However, considering the fact that nobody really has a clue on just how the final product will look like, or whether there will ever be a final product, the people from Google and Yahoo can still relax (that is, if they were ever bothered by this news).
