"QUAERO: isn't that the search engine that former French president Jacques CHIRAC declared to be the EUROPEAN challenge to Google? A pub-lic alternative to Silicon Valley-born commercial search engines, funded by the French state, in service of the PUBLIC GOOD, in the true tradition of the GRAND PROJET? An INFORMATION MACHINE capable of reclaiming European LANGUAGE and intellectual HERITAGE in the age of GLOBALIZATION?

NO. Quaero is the name of a CONSORTIUM of technology firms and RESEARCH LABS working together on multimedia and WEB SEARCH PROJECTS. It is a STATE-SPONSORED effort to stimulate PRIVATE French technological competitiveness.

According to Franc,ois BOURDONCLE, one of its participating developers, `Quaero is definitely not a project to build a web search engine, it is a project to make significant advances on the handling and indexing of multimedia content. It is completely out of the question to build a new, state-owned, state-operated, or even state-funded search engine. Only the R&D around these cutting-edge multimedia indexing technologies are in the scope of the project.'

But still, the issues that the idea of Quaero has raised – since its public launch by the former French president – constitute a formidable challenge. Internet search engines are political projects proper if only because they give and take power; they represent science, technology, (trans)national politics, private enterprise, culture, territoriality and language in ever different combinations. They are also social spaces. Internet search, the indispensable public tool that allows one to survey the ever increasing web, is currently in the hands of only a few global players, to whose private interests its setup corresponds."