Quaero, a joint search engine project of Germany and France, is no longer backed by Germany. The two countries were supposed to invest around 2.5 billion Euros into the project, however now that Germany has stepped down, the project is hanging in mid-air - although France announced that they will continue supporting the project.

The project was first announced back in April 2005 by Jacques Chirac, president of France and Gerhard Schroeder, the former German chancellor. Quaero was basically touted as a European response to Google, although it’s unclear why the Europe should ‘respond’ to Google in the first place.

Quaero is not primarily a text search engine; instead, it “will use techniques for recognizing, transcribing, indexing, and automatic translation of audiovisual documents and it will operate in several languages.”

Instead of Quaero, Germany will continue to develop their own ‘branch’ of the project, called Theseus. However, there are some indications that the Germans backed down from the project because of the anti-Google sentiment it carried.

Currently, neither of the two search engines is available for testing.

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