When I first heard about this two weeks ago I thought maybe it was an April fools joke that had spread around the internet but it appears to be True. France has declared War… on Google. You can read the story at business week.
This new project is named Quaero, Latin for “I seek” and aims to let Europeans have their own search engine that they can use instead of Google. The thing that Chirac is forgetting is that Europeans already have there own engines and they still choose to use Google and Yahoo as well as local privately owned engines. A search engine funded by the government will most likely not become as popular with the people. One can look at the recent Google vs. the government to see that Americans do not like the government monitoring there searches. I do not think the European people will like it very much either.

They are planning to invest 2 billion dollars into this project, so I would hope the search engine itself is decent. But just because you have money doesn’t mean you will have a good search engine. Microsoft has spent a lot of money on it’s search engine and it is still not up to Yahoo or Google’s level. You see Yahoo and Google did not start with a lot of money and are only where they are today because the provided relevant results. Yahoo lost market share to Google during a time where their search engine was powered by a separate company called Inktomi and the results where not very good. Yahoo had to adapt to stay alive and bought Inktomi to bring them in house and improve their search engine. Nothing is going to force the people at Quaero to adapt. They are going to get paid as long as they show up to work. But le’ts say Quaro does turn out to be a great search engine, it really doesn’t matter. Fast www.alltheweb.com was one of the best search engines there was before it was bought by Yahoo, yet it had little market share. Most in the search space knew about it but even we didn’t use it very often. There was just something dull about it. When it comes to search engines that have relevant results it’s more about what’s convenient and what we might call “cool”. Cool is when a site spreads by word of mouth because people think it’s cool. I would argue that MSN is mostly used out of convenience, Yahoo is used out of convenience and because it’s people think it’s cool, and Google when it fist started and only offered search was soley used because it was cool.

So for Quero if it is to thrive somehow they are going to have to either make it convenient, like making it the default search engine on all browsers in Europe (don’t think that will happen) or make it cool (don’t think that is going to happen either).

Chirac if you are listening why you don’t put that money into something more innovative. Something that has not already been done, you are not going to be able to beat the cream of the crop of free market built sites already out there.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 8th, 2006 at 10:47 amand is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.