Internet search has become the fastest growing and most profitable of online businesses, netting the likes of Google, Yahoo and Microsoft billions of pounds in advertising revenues annually.
In Britain alone last year the paid-for Internet search advertising market surpassed 1.2 billion pounds making it the fastest growing segment of the advertising industry, establishing search engines as the ascendant media power.
With such money and influence on the line, it comes as no surprise that building a better search engine has become mission critical for tech firms. It’s increasingly believed that the architect behind the next great search engine will have a profound impact not just on the tech industry, but on the global economy as well.
The Germans and French are determined to come out ahead. They have committed hundreds of millions of euros in research and development on what the tech world is calling the “Google killer”, a search engine that promises to spit back more relevant search results, and comprises all media formats – text, audio, video and still images. It’s based on the evolutionary idea of “the semantic web,” a phrase coined by Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee in 2001 to describe the next incarnation of the web, one that is more logically indexed, removing much of the serendipity that characterises our current web surfing activities.
Last week, the German government cleared a significant hurdle in its ambition to plant the country’s flag on semantic search. The European Union granted the government permission to distribute 120 million euros (80 million pounds) in grants to a host of tech companies, including national heavyweights SAP AG and Siemens AG, for the creation of The Theseus Project, a next-generation search engine based on semantic technologies.
Originally, the Germans and the French were supposed to work together on the project, but the countries parted earlier this year, citing a disagreement over what a next-generation search engine should be designed to perform.
The French are calling their search engine “Quaero”, an initiative first announced in 2005 to much fanfare that could cost up to 2.5 billion euros to develop. Some have suggested the Germans balked at the development costs and thus went off on their own to develop a much sleeker model.
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Published on 24 July
