I doubt that Google’s executives ever lost any sleep over the joint French-German venture to create a new European search engine, Quaero, but now they can really relax: it looks like the French and the Germans are parting company:
"Apparently, the co-operation had “Not been easy”. Heise.de reports that Hartmut Schauerte said the French were more interested in pursuing a ‘conventional search engine’ whereas the German Government expressly did not want to go into direct competition with Google and others and wanted to concentrate more on the development of the semantic web. Theseus would fulfil these aims. The partners previously involved with Quaero would remain on board, he said."
The semantic web focus of Theseus is supposed to employ fuzzy logic to produce more intelligent search results. For example, in searching the word "Golf" the search engine would be able to know whether to return Web sites dealing with the sport of golf or with the Volkswagen-branded car. Whether Theseus and the semantic web will ever be commercially viable is open to question.
Meanwhile Germans continue to google; most searched word: sex.
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Well, I believe that the top position of “sex” as a search is an international thing 🙂
das denke ich, wenn ich meinen seitenzaehler so ansehe, aber auch. ich koennte sogar noch ein paar “spezialitaeten” beisteuern, lasse dies aber im hinblick auf die moralischen amerikanischen gemueter lieber sein … 😉