First up is Exalead, a privately held company with offices in New York and Paris. Already an established player in the search market, Exalead offers a range of products and solutions spanning desktop to enterprise. The company’s technology can be examined via its publicly accessible web search engine (www.exalead.com), and is well worth visiting if only to discover what so-called web 2.0 technology is capable of delivering.
Exalead offers some interesting facilities, such as real-time statistical linguistics and statistical semantics, in order to provide advanced query capabilities and linguistics features. Other advanced functions include proximity search, clustering, stemming, phonetic search, and the ability to turn the search site into a personal portal. All-in-all, Exalead makes Google look very ordinary. Other companies involved in the interface research include Lycos Europe, Laboratory DFKI, and Siemens.
Other European (though mainly French) companies and institutions working on the project include Arvato, Bertelsman, the French National Institute of Audiovisual, Thomson, France Telecom, the French National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Control (INRIA), the French Institute for Music and Acoustic Research and Coordination, and LTU Technologies. Deutsche Telecom is participating as an observer.
Of these, perhaps LTU Technologies provides us with the biggest clue as to the primary thrust of Quaero. LTU describes itself as a vendor of image mining technology. Its image search and recognition solutions are widely used across a range of verticals, including child exploitation monitoring and investigation, general law enforcement, intelligence analysis, media, life sciences, and high-tech.
The company’s offerings include Image-Seeker, which is a visual search engine, and Image-Filter, an image classification platform. Those visiting corbis.ltutech.com can catch a glimpse of Image-Seeker in action, and will also glean an insight into Quaero.
Project Quaero has a five-year timeline and an overall budget of around E2 billion. Compare this with the $1.1 billion that Microsoft invested in MSN search in 2005 and it looks as though the odds are somewhat stacked against Quaero. At the last count, Google had around 36 initiatives on the go, and so it seems unlikely that Google is betting its future on a single offering or technology.
Project Quaero is important, however, as it will undoubtedly showcase the talent that Europe has to offer, and promises to protect the cultural heritage of the region. Project Quaero might not be as high-profile as Airbus or the E3.8 billion Galileo satellite navigation project, but in the long-run it may turn out to be just as important from a cultural standpoint.
Source: OpinionWire by Butler Group (www.butlergroup.com)
