Quaero: search yields trouble

Do you remember when French President Chirac launched an initiative to build a European search engine to compete with Google? YAGIDF = Yet Another Government Initiative Destined to Fail. A little more than a year later, it does seem that Quaero found trouble while searching for an architecture for the future of search: I clipmarked here a piece of news that I found on Slashdot today. And have you tried "www.quaero.com" or "www.quaero.org"? What's a search engine that needs another search engine to be found by a user worth? How about a new product that does not have a web presence before it's completemy developed? Passé? Perhaps it is time for European governments to change the ways in which they try to support European entrepreneurship and crucially time to stop having dreams of European grandeur, come back to Earth and act realistically... Shimon Peres stated that governments are becoming irrelevant in December at Le Web 3. Quaero might be a good example.
Meanwhile Google presses on and continues to let a thousand flowers bloom in a process of continuous innovation. At the same time I know Mangrove Capital and Mark Tluszcz who have been eager to do something in the search engine space since late 2005 (go to this site, search for "Tluszcz" and watch this video



- sorry but v-pod.tv does not support linking to videos or embedding it appears.) seem to be betting on Quintura, an interesting search engine that uses artificial intelligence to interconnect concepts that the user is looking for. I saw a presentation of theirs at Le Web 3 and tested the platform: it's quite good although there are a couple of bugs with the nice flash representation of concepts (last time I checked it did not update when the user hit the Back button of the Firefox 2.0 browser).