[24.04.2008 first posted on silicon republic]
A European ‘Google killer’ search engine project funded to the tune of €93m and backed by the French Government has been labelled a waste of money as the technology will have changed considerably by the time it is finished in 2013.

Search engine marketing company boss, Mark Furber, believes a five-year development plan for the new search project QUAERO could be out-moded due to the pace of technology change and it has therefore no chance of overtaking Google.
“Look back five years at the way the internet was in 2003, and how the technology has evolved. The pace of change is getting faster, forcing internet companies to work harder to keep up,” Furber said.
Furber is the managing director of NetCallidus, a £3m sterling-a-year online marketing company.
“A publicly funded project like this has no chance of overtaking Google, even if that money was spent on development over one year, not five.
“The only way to create a viable European rival to Google is to use the money to fund research at one of its existing major rivals, such as Yahoo!,” Furber suggested.
QUAERO was awarded €93m by the French Government to work on its multimedia search technology. The project received the go-ahead to proceed from the European Commission last month.
The project is made up of 23 companies working together, including Siemens and France Telecom.
QUAERO has received a lot of media attention in recent months and its owners insist it is not an actual search engine for text but a search engine for multimedia.
The project has been criticised as its investment is dwarved by the finances available to Google and Yahoo!, and tech firm Autonomy called the plan “a blatant case of misguided and unnecessary nationalism” on the part of the French.
Originally QUAERO was a French and German initiative but the German consortium pulled out because it wanted the engine to focus on text, while the French team wanted to focus on image search.
The search engine market is already pretty well sewn up. Figures show that all Google sites have a total of 56.5pc market share for worldwide internet search. Its closest rival is Yahoo! with just 23.3pc.
By John Kennedy