German economics ministers reveals move away from 'Quaero'

Heise.de brings us the news (in German) that the German Government will be moving away from co-operation with the French over the search engine research project ‘Quaero’ even creating their own new project with a new name ‘Theseus’.

The announcement came from Germany’s Economics minister, Hartmut Schauerte, at an IT Summit in Potsdam. He said (translating) “The co-operation is at an end and although we won’t be cutting all ties, the project will in future be a national German project with the political and economic aims of this summit.”

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 Potsdam Summit aims to focus more German development effort on innovation in the digital field. Senior German Government ministers attended including Chancellor Angela Merkel.

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Andy Atkins-Kruger

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Andy is the CEO of Webcertain. He is a trained linguist with 20 years of experience in international marketing, having helped major brand leaders with their advertising and public relations projects on five continents. Webcertain has been operating multilingual search marketing campaigns for over 15 years and is one of few agencies which only deal with international campaigns; the company doesn't deal in single market projects. Andy speaks regularly at conferences around the world.

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