December 28, 2006
Countering Google and Anglo-Saxon Cultural Imperialism
You think the French would've learned from the model of national champions, the Concord, minitel, etc., but apparently not:
The war waged by French president Jacques Chirac against “Anglo-Saxon” cultural imperialism suffered a blow today when the Germans announced they were pulling out of a rival European search engine to Google.
Earlier this year Mr Chirac announced a series of ambitious technological projects designed to challenge the global dominance of the US. They included Quaero, a Franco-German search engine whose name is Latin for “I search”, but which was swiftly dubbed “Ask Chirac”.
Today German officials confirmed they were abandoning the €400m (£270m) project. Senior officials in Germany’s economics and technology ministry said they had decided to dump Quaero because they had been sceptical it would ever be able to challenge the might of Google and Yahoo!
Cooperation with France had “not been simple,” they said. Asked today what had gone wrong, a ministry spokeswoman told the Guardian: “There were disagreements. The French wanted a search engine. We wanted something else.”
Instead, Germany has now decided to launch its own national search engine, Theseus.
Posted by Robin Varghese at 01:30 PM | Permalink
Comments
This post was a Ringmaster's Pick for the 62nd Carnival of the Infosciences, 7 January 2007. This installment of the Carnival may be found at: http://marklindner.info/blog/2007/01/07/carnival-of-the-infosciences-62/
Posted by: Mark Lindner | Jan 7, 2007 6:47:24 PM
Post a comment