Quaero

Quaero (Latin for I'm looking for ) is a French project with German participation to finance the exploration of search engines.

Since October 2004, belonging to the Quaero project Internet search engine Exalead is based in Paris (France ) online. Otherwise, the project is at the stage of the changing political pronouncements. A search engine Quaero under the name currently does not exist ( October 2008). An existing public offering of an experimental search engine under that name on the Internet was limited about the end of 2006 to a narrow circle of those authorized to access. The name Quaero itself was obviously not protected by the project participants; same domains on the Internet are obviously used by unaffiliated third parties.

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

The first German " IT Summit " in Potsdam on 18 December 2006 said Secretary Hartmut Schauerte, the federal government would withdraw from the Quaero consortium and instead focus on the purely German research program under the name " Theseus ". However, the French government encourages the development project continues.

  • 4.1 Project participants
  • 4.2 Media for Quaero

Motivation and Goals

Background of the Quaero concept is in particular the announcement of the search engine company Google to digitize several million books especially American libraries and to make the World Wide Web (see Google Book Search ). As this offer is intended to include a full-text search, fearing some representatives of French libraries that this action could lead to a not again aufzuholenden supremacy of the English language on the web and may be significant information disappearing into the so-called Deep Web.

In response, initiated by French President Jacques Chirac Quaero project is to build a search engine technology that has its roots in Europe rather than in the U.S., and will be based in particular to be digitized collections of European libraries. The ambitious plans also see an automatic translation of texts in the language of the requester, as well as image, audio and video searches. In addition to Quaero can be used on the PC, on the phone or on TV.

In addition to Google so Quaero thus takes about the search engine giant Yahoo! and Microsoft to target. It is unclear at present but will be equipped with technology which Quaero and how you want to break Google's domination, which has neither Yahoo nor Microsoft succeeded.

However, the initially involved German government saw the project goal is not to build a competitor to Google, therefore retired in December 2006 from the Quaero project and sets the parallel development continued under their own names Theseus. In July 2007, there have been many press releases about launch of the German part of the program in the media.

Participating organizations

Economy

Quaero is currently being developed by Thomson (project management), France Telecom and the French search engine Exalead operators. It involved, among other things, the Internet service provider ( Institut National Audiovisual ( INA) ), Jouve, the German Thomson -Brandt GmbH and Grass Valley Germany GmbH.

Research institutes

Other partners include the following French and German research institutes:

  • INRA
  • INRIA
  • IRCAM
  • IRIT
  • LIMSI -CNRS
  • Rheinisch- Westfälische Technische Hochschule Aachen
  • Karlsruhe Institute of Technology
  • University Joseph Fourier Grenoble I, Grenoble
Institut national de la recherche agronomique French Institute for Research in Computer Science and Automation
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