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April 8, 2006
Quaero: Europe-funded multimedia search engine
Quaero is a large-scale government-funded effort to create a European competitor to the American search hegemony of Google, Yahoo and Microsoft. Exalead, a French-based search engine that many people think is cool, is one of the partners and is likely providing the backbone of the text search.
The main innovative focus is on multi-media search. One piece that caught my attention is based on finding similar images.
Users can enter a query to get similar images. And pages that have unlabeled images will inherit labels from similar images on other pages.
The government has not announced (or determined?) how much money it will allocate to the project. Given the number of players and the history of European projects, I have very low expectations for this project to create a successful new consumer search engine. But I think it's great that Europe is being visionary and recognizes the importance of search. I also hope they produce some great new technology that Powerset can license when we're ready!
Posted by barney at April 8, 2006 6:20 PM
This entry was posted in the following categories: Search
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