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Quaero (Latin language for I seek) was a initiative designed to compete with the Google search engine. It was announced in 2005 by Jacques Chirac and Gerhard Schröder, the political leaders of France and of Germany. As a research and development program, it had the goal of developing multimedia and multilingual indexing and management tools for professional and general public applications (such as search engines). , Press release from AII, 26-APR-06. State aid: Commission authorises aid of €99 million to France for QUAERO R&D programme The European Commission approved the aid granted by France on 11 March 2008.
This program was supported by the OSEO. It was a French project with the participation of several Germany partners. The consortium was led by Thomson SA. Other companies involved in the consortium were France Télécom, Exalead, , Jouve, , Vecsys, Vocapia Research, LTU Technologies, and Synapse Développement. Many public research institutes were also involved, including National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Control, Laboratoire d'informatique pour la mécanique et les sciences de l'ingénieur, IRCAM, RWTH Aachen, University of Karlsruhe, Institut de recherche en informatique de Toulouse, Clips Imag, Groupe des Écoles des Télécommunications, Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique; as well as other public organisations such as Institut national de l'audiovisuel, Bibliothèque nationale de France, LIPN, and Direction Générale de l'Armement.
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.
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, 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.)
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.
Writing in IEEE Spectrum, Nick Tredennick 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."Ross, P. E. (2007). What's the Latin for "delusional"? IEEE Spectrum, 44(1), pp. 49-50.
According to the print edition of The Economist, 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".
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.
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