Open Access News

A project to develop advanced multimedia search technologies led by France's Thomson SA has gone into hiding in the face of intense publicity this week that it is building a "Google killer" that will help to improve Europe's standing in the high-tech world. The project, called Quaero, found itself in the spotlight following remarks last week by French President Jacques Chirac in a speech laying out his agenda for France in 2006. "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 SA, the aircraft maker that competes with The Boeing Co. in a contest symbolizing the economic rivalry between Europe and the U.S. 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 chairman, Frank Dangeard, who imposed a "news blackout" Thursday on Thomson's media staff and ordered the project's Web site 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...."Probably politically what's behind it is an uncomfortable feeling of having all access to knowledge and information filtered or provided through a search engine that (comes from) abroad," said Alex Waibel, director of the InterACT Center at Germany's University of Karlsruhe, which is developing Quaero's speech and language processing technologies. "Having said that," he added, "there's also a wish to make search, in a way, much richer, and in particular that involves multimedia and multilingual information."