In the hope of boosting industrial prestige at a difficult time, French President Jacques Chirac yesterday launched (April 25) a 2 billion euro plan to back a series of six projects including a Franco-German search engine, Quaero, intending to compete with Google.

More than a European version of Google, Quaero, which means “I search for” in Latin, is a program of industrial innovation aiming at developing multimedia search software for the general public that would be used on both computers and mobile phones.

Certain critics abroad have already emerged accusing the project to be another example of the interventionism of the French State.

The participants to Quaero, such as Thomson, France Telecom and Exalead, have underlined that the project is only a catalyst enabling to gather the dispersed progresses made over the last years.

The French state has a long tradition of spending public money in high tech projects with mixed results: only time will tell if Quaero will turn to be a success like the TGV or disaster like the Minitel…