In the first of several articles on European search engine research, Pandia takes a look at the French search engine Quaero.

Although the search engine scene is dominated by American companies like Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft and Ask, there is quite a lot of search engine research going on on the European scene as well.

What’s typical for many of them is that they are technology driven, i.e. they are based on bottom-up approaches where research institutions and companies — supported by public institutions — try to develop new search technologies that can be applied by businesses at a later stage.

The Chorus project

The Chorus project is a EU Commission coordination project that is to “enhance the interactions and to invoke discussions between the key players of the IST ‘Cluster’ and thus to stimulate the creation of the European Research Area (ERA)”

This is Euro-speak meaning that Chorus is to function as a learning arena for companies and research institutions involved in information and communication technology innovation.

Chorus is, for instance, supporting the preparation of a road map for the development of audio-visual search engines in the European Union.

The Quaero multimedia search adventure

One of these search engines is the French Quaero. At a recent Chorus workshop Pieter van der Linden and Henri Gouraud presented the current state of the project.

Van der Linden and Gouraud argue that multimedia content will become more and more important, and that such content will be accessed from different types of devices, including the mobile PCs, phones, cameras etc.

Moreover, the traditional distinction between consumers and producers will vanish. As we have pointed out here at Pandia, the arrival of services like YouTube and Flickr show that the user has become content provider, uploading videos and photos for all to see.

Van der Linden and Gouraud also draw attention to the arrival of blogs and podcasts, and the increasing use of multimedia content. In April 2006 26 percent of French Internet users (called “internauts” in French. Now, that is a good word!) had watched video online. One year later the percentage had risen to 36.6 percent.

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