Quaero - The Google Challenge That Never Will Be.

Posted on September 21, 2006
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Extra $600m for Google’s State Funded European Competitor


“Being an entrepreneur, I am skeptical of the entrepreneurship and creative skills of publicly funded committees. Few creative class capabilities are being harnessed by the Quaero consortium.” That’s from the guys at EUCAP.

I have a bit of history with the EU audio-visual search community so I can expand on this a little.

Quaero was set up by Jacques Chirac of France and Schroeder of Germany when he was still in power.

At the same time the EU internally were pitching for a 50 million EURO budget to explore multimedia search. I was rapporteur at the workshop held to explore multimedia search themes and wrote the document that helped acquire the funding.

My impressions:

We saw some great demos of image inputs, ie using images as query tools and bringing semantics into video clips. That’s the direction Quaero is headed.

But.

The EU at that stage was also setting up vertical associations, what the EU calls Technology Platforms, headed by the major European companies who would effectively control future R&D specifications and spending. Spending over seven years will top Euro 50 billion.

For three decades now the EU has sought ways to subsidise large EU tech companies. For a while during the dtocom days the entrepreneur got a look in. Now the EU is reverting to type and the emphasis is all on companies who struggle to innovate because they are not managed for innovation. It’s really a mess. Those same companies are involved in Quero so….

What could be done? Search technology has taken the folksonomy route instead of the semantic route and I think rightly so.

Information, whether text or video, only has value at the time of use. It’s a definition of knowledge that people forget. It has value at the point of use, full stop. The great advantage of folksonomies is they introduce use into the equation. Information is discovered and rated in the act of using it.

After and before it can be forgotten. In fact an alternative definition of search engine might be a forgetting machine. The key functionality is, once you’ve used the information you can forget it.

But isn’t the key functionality that you can then rediscover it? Not at all. Information is so pervasive that the second time round you might make better use of different information. Context is never the same twice.

I think the EU could create an audio-visual search engine for Euro 500,000 if it understood the principles of recommendation, forgetfulness and hanging loose. The chances of them funding easy solutions - zero.

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