Some Europeans are concerned about US hegemony in the worldwide information market. Now France -- and maybe Germany -- aims to develop a Eurocentric alternative to the dominant Internet search engine, Google....few people doing a search on Google or one of its competitors (Yahoo, MSN, and Alta Vista make up most of the remaining 10 percent of the market) give much thought to the fact that they are using the services of a for-profit US company....But for Wolfgang Sander-Beuermann, head of the search-engine research lab at the University of Hanover and part of a growing cadre of European Google-skeptics, the situation is downright dangerous. "Google is on the way to becoming the most global media power that ever existed on earth, and the potential for misusing it is so enormous it cannot be accepted," said Sander-Beuermann, who also founded the nonprofit Association for the Promotion of Search Engine Technology and Free Access to Knowledge (SuMa)....Another man on the case is French President Jacques Chirac, who is pushing an initiative for France, together with Germany and perhaps other EU nations, to develop a European search engine to compete with the American behemoth. "We must take up the challenge presented by American giants like Google and Yahoo. There is a the threat that tomorrow, what is not available online will be invisible to the world," Chirac said in a presidential address to the nation at New Year's. His project, spurred by the French government and headed by an Internet information company called exalead.com, runs under the name Quaero (Latin for "I seek.") Germany's only link to Quaero at present is an agreement between a German meta-search engine, metager.de, and exalead. But several technology and information companies are considering the project. They include Siemens, Bertelsmann, and public broadcaster ARD (which Deutsche Welle and this Web site are part of)....Hendrik Speck is a lecturer in computer science at the University of Kaiserslautern, and is a strong Quaero activist. He seconds Sander-Beuermann’s concerns, and cites the example of searching for the keyword "Troy" on Google. "We all know that keyword has a rich cultural history. But at Google, most of the first results are a description of a second-class Hollywood production featuring a third-rate actor," Speck said, referring to the movie starring Brad Pitt....It is not yet clear how much European investors will ultimately be willing to spend, but their quest to build a rival to Google is likely to be very costly. Google spent $7.5 million (6.3 million euros) on one lab with 10 student in its development stages, "which is more than some of our universities have over here," Speck said. Meanwhile, the US search engine behemoth continues to spend $400 million annually on research and development.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 3/09/2006 10:47:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
