Filed under: Internet, Web services, Google
Quaero: The official search engine of the European Union
In his 2006 New Year's address, French President Jacques Chirac apparently focused on Quaero, a new
search engine being built by "some of the top tech labs in France and
Germany." The project is ambitious, to say the least, reportedly providing
"an array of multimedia tools for identifying and indexing images, sound and text," including "a
powerful translating tool which will be able to 'understand' audio as well as text," and available on mobile
devices and digital TVs. Beyond that, the article is tantalizingly vague, and includes this less-than-promising
passage: "The ambitious project will probably not be available anytime in the
near future. Quaero is still in the earliest stages of development, so early that none of the major players have yet
ventured a guess as to how much the project might cost. When Quaero does launch, it
will have a great deal of catching up to do." Good luck with that, Chirac.[Via Slashdot]
After spending the better part of an hour on 