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Quaero (
Latin Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through the power of the ...
for ''I seek'') was a
Europe Europe is a large peninsula conventionally considered a continent in its own right because of its great physical size and the weight of its history and traditions. Europe is also considered a Continent#Subcontinents, subcontinent of Eurasia ...
an research and development program with the goal of developing multimedia and multilingual indexing and management tools for professional and general public applications (such as search engines). The
European Commission The European Commission (EC) is the executive of the European Union (EU). It operates as a cabinet government, with 27 members of the Commission (informally known as "Commissioners") headed by a President. It includes an administrative body o ...
approved the aid granted by
France France (), officially the French Republic ( ), is a country primarily located in Western Europe. It also comprises of Overseas France, overseas regions and territories in the Americas and the Atlantic Ocean, Atlantic, Pacific Ocean, Pac ...
on 11 March 2008. This program was supported by the
OSEO EPIC BPI-Groupe (BPI is the acronym of ''Banque Publique d'Investissement'') is a French government agency, previously known as EPIC OSEO. In 2013, the French government reorganized their sovereign funds. OSEO's subsidiary, OSEO S.A., was merged ...
. It was a French project with the participation of several
German German(s) may refer to: * Germany (of or related to) **Germania (historical use) * Germans, citizens of Germany, people of German ancestry, or native speakers of the German language ** For citizens of Germany, see also German nationality law **Ger ...
partners. The consortium was led by
Thomson SA Thomson may refer to: Names * Thomson (surname), a list of people with this name and a description of its origin * Thomson baronets, four baronetcies created for persons with the surname Thomson Businesses and organizations * SGS-Thomson Mic ...
. Other companies involved in the consortium were
France Télécom Orange S.A. (), formerly France Télécom S.A. (stylized as france telecom) is a French multinational corporation, multinational telecommunications corporation. It has 266 million customers worldwide and employs 89,000 people in France, and 5 ...
,
Exalead EXALEAD is a software company, created in 2000, that provided search platforms and search-based applications (SBA) for consumer and business users. The company is headquartered in Paris, France, and is a subsidiary of Dassault Systèmes (). ...
, , Jouve, , Vecsys, Vocapia Research,
LTU Technologies Founded in 1999, LTU technologies is a company in the field of image recognition for commercial and government customers. The company provides technologies for image matching, similarity and color search for integration into applications for mob ...
, and Synapse Développement. Many public research institutes were also involved, including
National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Control The National Institute for Research in Digital Science and Technology (Inria) () is a French national research institution focusing on computer science and applied mathematics. It was created under the name ''Institut de recherche en informatiq ...
,
Laboratoire d'informatique pour la mécanique et les sciences de l'ingénieur The Computer Science Laboratory for Mechanics and Engineering Sciences (LIMSI) was a CNRS pluri-disciplinary science laboratory in Orsay, France. LIMSI academics and scholars come primarily from the Engineering and Information Sciences fields, bu ...
,
IRCAM IRCAM (French: ''Ircam, '', English: Institute for Research and Coordination in Acoustics/Music) is a French institute dedicated to the research of music and sound, especially in the fields of avant garde and electro-acoustical art music. It is ...
,
RWTH Aachen RWTH Aachen University (), also known as North Rhine-Westphalia Technical University of Aachen, Rhine-Westphalia Technical University of Aachen, Technical University of Aachen, University of Aachen, or ''Rheinisch-Westfälische Technische Hoch ...
,
University of Karlsruhe The Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT; german: Karlsruher Institut für Technologie) is a public research university in Karlsruhe, Germany. The institute is a national research center of the Helmholtz Association. KIT was created in 2009 w ...
, Institut de recherche en informatique de Toulouse, Clips Imag,
Groupe des Écoles des Télécommunications A group is a military unit or a military formation that is most often associated with military aviation. Air and aviation groups The terms group and wing differ significantly from one country to another, as well as between different branches o ...
, Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique; as well as other public organisations such as
Institut national de l'audiovisuel The (abbrev. INA), () is a repository of all French radio and television audiovisual archives. Additionally it provides free access to archives of countries such as Afghanistan and Cambodia. It has its headquarters in Bry-sur-Marne. Since 200 ...
,
Bibliothèque nationale de France The Bibliothèque nationale de France (, 'National Library of France'; BnF) is the national library of France, located in Paris on two main sites known respectively as ''Richelieu'' and ''François-Mitterrand''. It is the national repository ...
, LIPN, and
Direction Générale de l'Armement The Direction générale de l’armement (DGA; English: Directorate General of Armaments), is the French Government Defence procurement and technology agency responsible for project management, development and purchase of weapon systems for the Fr ...
. According to the AII press release, the main targeted applications could be divided into three broad classes: multimedia indexing and search tools for professional and general public use, including mobile environments; professional solutions for production, post-production, management and distribution of multimedia documents; and facilitation of access to cultural heritage such as audiovisual archives and digital libraries.


Announcements and history

Quaero was announced by
Jacques Chirac Jacques René Chirac (, , ; 29 November 193226 September 2019) was a French politician who served as President of France from 1995 to 2007. Chirac was previously Prime Minister of France from 1974 to 1976 and from 1986 to 1988, as well as Ma ...
and
Gerhard Schröder Gerhard Fritz Kurt "Gerd" Schröder (; born 7 April 1944) is a German lobbyist and former politician, who served as the chancellor of Germany from 1998 to 2005. From 1999 to 2004, he was also the Leader of the Social Democratic Party of Germany ...
during the French-German ministerial conference in April 2005. It was put forward again by Jacques Chirac in August 2005 at the inauguration of the new agency created to fund such programs, the
Agence de l'innovation industrielle The Agence de l'innovation industrielle was a French governmental agency created in 2005 to support technological projects. As of 2006, it was supporting seven projects: *BioHub, a chemistry projects to create products with cereals, without using ...
(AII), and in January 2006 in his New Year addresses, which received much attention from the public. Quaero was part of the first programs selected by the AII in April 2006. In December 2006, the new German government announced that it would devote its share of the funding to a slightly modified program geared toward knowledge management and semantic web, under the name of . Quaero received the approval of the European Commission in March 2008. €99m from the French government would go towards development of the program.


The search engine

Quaero was often described as a European competitor to
Google Google LLC () is an American multinational technology company focusing on search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, artificial intelligence, and consumer electronics. ...
as well as to other commercial search engines such as
Yahoo Yahoo! (, styled yahoo''!'' in its logo) is an American web services provider. It is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California and operated by the namesake company Yahoo! Inc. (2017–present), Yahoo Inc., which is 90% owned by investment funds ma ...
, Microsoft's
Bing Bing most often refers to: * Bing Crosby (1903–1977), American singer * Microsoft Bing, a web search engine Bing may also refer to: Food and drink * Bing (bread), a Chinese flatbread * Bing (soft drink), a UK brand * Bing cherry, a varie ...
and
Ask.com Ask.com (originally known as Ask Jeeves) is a question answering–focused e-business founded in 1996 by Garrett Gruener and David Warthen in Berkeley, California. The original software was implemented by Gary Chevsky, from his own design. Wa ...
. Quaero was not intended to be a text-based search engine but was mainly meant for multimedia search. The search engine would have used techniques for recognizing, transcribing, indexing, and automatic translation of audiovisual documents and would have operated in several languages. There was also a plan to have automatic recognition and indexing of images. According to an article in ''
The Economist ''The Economist'' is a British weekly newspaper printed in demitab format and published digitally. It focuses on current affairs, international business, politics, technology, and culture. Based in London, the newspaper is owned by The Econo ...
'', Quaero would have allowed users to search using a "query image", not just a group of keywords. In a process known as "image mining", software that recognizes shapes and colours would have been used to look for and retrieve still images and video clips that contained images similar to the query image. (The software was supplied by
LTU Technologies Founded in 1999, LTU technologies is a company in the field of image recognition for commercial and government customers. The company provides technologies for image matching, similarity and color search for integration into applications for mob ...
.) As France was researching image-searching, Germany was supposed to be advancing voice clip and sound media searches, with the intention of transcribing their content to text, and translating it to other languages, before they pulled out of the project. This would also allow for "query sound clips" following the paradigm of the "query image" mentioned above.


Criticism

The French satirical newspaper ''
Le Canard enchaîné (; English: "The Chained Duck" or "The Chained Paper", as is French slang meaning "newspaper") is a satirical weekly newspaper in France. Its headquarters is in Paris. Founded in 1915 during World War I, it features investigative journalism a ...
'' pointed out that the funding behind the project was dwarfed by both Microsoft and Google. Search experts Autonomy, (''Financial Times'') called the plan "a blatant case of misguided and unnecessary nationalism". The main issues were that: by the time of Quaero's launch, the search engine market would already have been generations ahead of Quaero in media and device capabilities; some argue that Chirac was more interested in defending French pride than global advancement of the Internet. Writing in IEEE Spectrum,
Nick Tredennick Harry L. "Nick" Tredennick was an American manager, inventor, VLSI design engineer and author who was involved in the development for Motorola's MC68000 and for IBM's Micro/370 microprocessors. He held BSEE and MSEE degrees from Texas Tech Uni ...
commented that "Going head-to-head with Google with a project involving well-funded, energetic entrepreneurs would be foolish. Attempting the same with a multigovernment collaboration is beyond description." According to the print edition of ''
The Economist ''The Economist'' is a British weekly newspaper printed in demitab format and published digitally. It focuses on current affairs, international business, politics, technology, and culture. Based in London, the newspaper is owned by The Econo ...
'', January 6, 2007 (pp. 5), Quaero "was reportedly scrapped" since the German partners "grumbled about the cost and have indicated they will produce their own, scaled-down search engine".


German departure

On December 18, 2006, , a state secretary within the Ministry for Economics and Labour, announced during the IT-summit in Potsdam that a German consortium had put together a semantic search project called that would be distinct from Quaero. The main source of disagreement was the format of the search engine, with German engineers favoring a text-based search engine and the French engineers favoring a multimedia search engine. Many German engineers also balked at what they thought was becoming too much of an anti-Google project, rather than a project driven by its own ideals.


End

The project ended on December 31, 2013.


See also


References


External links

* {{Official website, http://www.quaero.org Internet search engines