I just read that the European Union gave Germany the go ahead to give $165 million for research on Internet search-engine technologies that could someday challenge Google.
Called Theseus, the project is aiming "to develop the world's most advanced multimedia search engine for the next-generation Internet". It would translate, identify and index images, audio and text.
European companies in general spend far less on research than US companies do, and so the EU said the project should help change that.
The Theseus project was born out of Quaero, a joint French-German Internet search initiative. Quaero was put to rest in December 2006 when the German and French researchers "took different directions".
It really comes down to $165 million to take on Google. With Reported revenues of $3.87 billion for the quarter ended June 30, 2007, an increase of 58 percent from the same time last year, and an increase of 6 percent compared to the first quarter of 2007,
it doesn't sounds like a winning proposition.
Lets hope this new group isn't met with the same fate Legendary Greek King, and project namesake, Theseus, was when he was unceremoniously thrown off a cliff after he had lost popularity in Athens.