Germany stops funding building of internet search engine

Why would the governments of Germany and France think that they could do a better job of building a search engine than Google or Yahoo or someone else? That is just has obvious as them working on a new operating system. How about the government building all their own computers?

The German government confirmed Tuesday that it had decided to opt out of a multimillion-euro research effort to build a European search engine that would compete with Google, in what one participant described as a disagreement with France over the basic design of the project.

French participants in the secretive project, called Quaero, which means "I seek" in Latin, vowed to continue their efforts to develop the search engine, possibly with funding from the European Union.

The project was first revealed in April 2005 by President Jacques Chirac of France and the former German chancellor, Gerhard Schröder, as a European response to the U.S. search giant Google, but now it will have to proceed without support from the largest EU country.

The split underscores the difficulty of managing such cross-border projects, coming just months after it came to light that the wiring problem that delayed the Airbus A380 superjumbo project was in part caused by the fact that German engineers used different software from their French colleagues.

Germany and France had initially discussed plans to commit €1 billion to €2 billion, or $1.3 billion to $2.6 billion, over five years to Quaero. . . . . .

Thanks to Manny Klausner for this.