Searching For A Fight

Quaero, ergo sum: I search, therefore I am. That could be the new Internet mantra if an ambitious European Internet project lives up to its hype. The proposed search engine, a Franco-German joint public and private initiative, was trumpeted by French President Jacques Chirac as an attempt to "launch with our European partners the first genuinely multimedia search engine" to meet the "global challenge" issued by U.S.-based Google and Yahoo!.

The project's chief selling point is said to be a revolutionary capability to search as well as translate audio and video sources. But details are scarce: Thomson, the French company heading the endeavor, even shut down its website last week after details of the potential services set tech tongues wagging. A source who wouldn't go on record because negotiations on funding are continuing — unconfirmed reports put the initial bill at €1-2 billion — would only say that Quaero will go beyond Google in its ability to dig into the content of multimedia files. But the source acknowledged that a launch is still months away.

John Battelle, author of a book on Google, thinks transatlantic rivalry might be playing an outsized role. "I'm skeptical of government forays into free-market economies when the primary motivation is political," he says. And even if Quaero should prove revolutionary, to compete with the mammoth Internet companies it's best to own the domain Quaero.com. That name, however, already belongs to the North Carolina-based marketing and technology company Quaero Corporation. Patrick Dineen, its senior vice president of sales and marketing, says he is curious about his company's European namesake. He's not alone.