The German government has confirmed that it is not participating in a multi-million dollar project to build a European search engine rivaling Google.
Participants said Germany pulled out because of a disagreement with France over the project's basic design, the International Herald Tribune said. French participants said they would continue to develop the search engine, possibly with funding assistance from the European Union.
German officials said they would concentrate on a smaller domestic research effort.
The project -- called Quaero, meaning "I seek" in Latin -- was introduced in April 2005 by French President Jacques Chirac former German chancellor Gerhard Schroder, as a European response to the U.S. search engine giant Google. But when Schroder was defeated at the polls and Christian Democratic Angela Merkel took office, the decision was made to abandon the project.
Germany and France initially discussed committing $1.3 billion to $2.6 billion to Quaero over five years. The project was to have been paid for by the French and German governments, with contributions from technology companies in the two countries.
One observer said he wasn't sure whether France alone could sustain momentum behind Quaero or secure the funding from the European Union.
Copyright 2007 by United Press International
Related stories:
T-Mobile set to launch first Google-powered phone
(AP) -- Google Inc.'s announcement last year that it would give away software that could run cell phones was met by dizzy accolades from analysts who thought it would let the search engine company conquer the world of mobile advertising.
Olympic Games: Have we reached a plateau in terms of speed?
The world-record pace for the marathon continues to improve for both men and women. For men, the record pace for the marathon is now about as fast as the record pace for the 10,000-meter run just after World War II. Today, champion athletes are running more than four times farther at speeds of well under five minutes per mile.
Network designed to help health care professionals
European researchers have developed a computer system designed to give health care professionals access to a broader range of medical information.
Music lovers get the 'meta' of digital audio
Groundbreaking audio software developed by European researchers could help music lovers jump to the hidden beats.
Microsoft Buys Stake in CareerBuilder.com
The agreement gives MSN a piece of CareerBuilder.com, extends an existing deal between the companies until 2013, and adds in MSN's European partners.
Hum a few bars and I’ll find it
A European research consortium hopes to make it much easier to find audio/visual content online. The new search approach will be driven by content or example rather than relying on key words and tags.
New system solves the 'who is J. Smith' puzzle
Penn State researchers have developed an automated system that can determine which "J. Smith" is authoring papers on computer science—the one who teaches at Penn State or the one who teaches at M.I.T—as well as whether "J. Smith" is John Smith, Jane Smith, Joanna L. Smith or James H. Smith.
Putting services at the heart of tomorrow's software
Service development in Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is the point where small, functional services can be linked together to achieve some larger goal, and it is the point where computing could finally deliver the productivity gains and functional flexibility that it promised for so long.