EU Google Competitor Project Gets Aid Worth $166 Million 111
mernil wrote with the news that the EU Commission has given the go-ahead to provide funding for Germany's search engine project, called Theseus. Early this year we discussed Germany's withdrawal from the French project Quaero. From the outside, it looks like the EU Commission is unwilling to put all its eggs in one basket, funding the German project to the tune of 120 million euro, or $US 166 million. Dow Jones reports: "The aim is to develop new search technologies for the next generation Internet, including 'semantic technologies which try to recognize the meaning of content and place it in its proper context.' The semantic Web has been considered the next evolution of the Internet at least since Tim Berners-Lee, widely considered a creator of the current version of the Internet, published an article describing it in 2001. In theory, a semantic Web could receive a user request for information about fishing, for example, and automatically narrow the results according to the user's individual needs rather than blanket the user with pages related to numerous aspects of fishing. The Commission's funding approval Thursday immediately sparked talk of building a potential European challenger to Web search leader Google Inc."
uh... (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah, right.
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
"The NeXTcube used by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN became the first Web server."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Berners-Lee [wikipedia.org]
Re:uh... (Score:4, Informative)
The problem is he didn't come close to inventing the Internet, hence the GP to this post. The Internet is just a big honkin wide area network that uses IP as it's underlying protocol. The Web is an application.
Re:uh... (Score:5, Informative)
Pity there was no internet to shuffle all those usenet articles and mail about. No doubt that would have helped.
Gah.
Re:uh... (Score:5, Funny)
There isn't much to the internet without http. The only other protocol that comes even close
I know! Those other silly protocols, like SMTP, IMAP4, MIME, POP3, DNS, NTP, FTP, SIP, SNMP, SSH, telnet, RPC, RTSP, TLS/SSL, SOAP, ... nobody uses 'em much.
Re: (Score:1)
I've heard of SMTP, IMAP, MIME and the rest, but whats this Soap you speak of?
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
Re: (Score:1)
Have a VC / startup mentality (Score:5, Insightful)
Instead of big government bureaucracy, trying to force a Google competitor from the top down, the EU should be seeding promising European startups. The next Google is probably not going to look anything like Google, and you aren't going to find it with this style of funding.
See also:
Re:Have a VC / startup mentality (Score:5, Insightful)
What they need is an environment where to two Phd students can go to some rich dude's doorstep, pitch an idea, and walk away with a check for $100k without ever being invited inside.
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
It's LOSING damnit, LOSING. Repeat after me, so you'll rem... oh.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Have a VC / startup mentality (Score:5, Informative)
From the about page of the THESEUS website http://theseus-programm.de/about_theseus [theseus-programm.de]:
"At the current time, 31 research institutions, universities, and companies have joined the THESEUS program with planned projects. The industrial and public research partners are cooperating closely."
It appears this project was mainly requested by German industry and from the website seems that it will closely involve industry. It's quite funny though how the story submitter and many commenters here have twisted the facts to make the project sound as socialist as possible!
The story should really fit the facts though rather than the facts fitting the story!
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Why are people labelling this "big government bureaucracy"? Just because it's funded by the government, it doesn't have to be awful. PyPy [pypy.org], for example, was mostly funded by the EU, and that's very promising. KDE has been partially funded by governments as well.
Re: (Score:2)
Who knows what the future will bring? But there certainly are a number of real problems with Google's approach - among other the closed source
Re: (Score:2)
Nothing new (Score:2)
I am looking forward to see if free search engines such as Wikia Search will succeed. They are really something new and I can only wish their best.
Re: (Score:2)
free search engines such as Wikia
The "free" part of Wikia is people working for free for Wikia. Wikia may have the same problem AOL did [salon.com] with the Fair Labor Standards Act. AOL used to have unpaid "community leaders" with some administrative powers, but they had to stop doing that, or pay them.
Wikia exists to monetize fancruft. The largest Wikia projects are related to Star Wars, DC Comics, Doom, Yu-Gi-Oh, Halo, etc. That doesn't lead to a search engine, unless your searches are mostly about Wookies.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
This web search will read your mind and then determine what you need to see (after a few particularly well targeted advertisements, of course).
I, for one, welcome our new automatically adjusting search overlords.
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:1)
Theseus, by name, is doomed to fail (Score:3, Funny)
They rejected my name (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
So, you need to finely gauge your audience's exact level of knowledge of ancient Greek culture, then. They know 'Eureka', but think 'Theseus' is kind of like a dictionary. It's a tricky business, this...
Re: (Score:2)
wikipedia: "The name "Google" originated from a misspelling of "googol,"[16][17] which refers to 10100 (the number represented by a 1 followed by one-hundred zeros)."
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
It is indeed a tricky business. In fact it's very, very obvious that no-one at Yahoo! had ever read Swift. While it is one of the most appropriate names for the executives of what the company has become, it's highly likely that that word didn't mean what they thought it meant.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
Yeah good point. But then how would you go about finding a better word for the same thing?
(sorry, couldn't resist...)
Here come the flames (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Here come the flames (Score:4, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
Oh, wait...
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1, Funny)
mixed feelings (Score:2)
on the other hand, will a gov't funded search engine "overlook" material said gov't doesn't want you to find?
on the gripping hand, "Tim Berners Lee vs Al Gore for the undisputed Inventor of the Internet!"
Re: (Score:1)
Not that govt. The only thing they might agree upon is that the nazis are evil but that's pretty much the limit.
Google sucks (Score:2)
http://www.google.com/search?q=DirectoryIsolation M ode [google.com] - returns 8 hits. The most useful link off the search is https://thinstall.com/help/index.php?attributes_in i2.htm [thinstall.com]. In itself,
Re: (Score:2)
The Name (Score:1)
-Grey [wellingtongrey.net]
Semantic web (Score:2)
Ah well, just another few hundred millions down the drain. It's only tax money, includi
Are they THAT insecure (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Well, you probably haven't heard of most of the smaller, less glamorous projects funded by the European Commission. Some excerpts from descriptions of websites I've built for a couple of 'em, all in a particular subsection of industry:
"Innovative Integrated Energy Efficiency Solutions
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
What a complete waste of taxpayer money (Score:5, Insightful)
This is a ridiculous waste of taxpayer money, and a good demonstration of all that is wrong with beurocratic top-down European Union thinking (and I speak as a European).
If you really want to promote innovation, then stop wasting taxpayer money on this type of crap and lower corporate taxes, encouraging an environment where the fit will thrive and the unfit will die.
Re: (Score:2)
Damn HTML. (Score:2)
It's not waste of tax payers money (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
That is what Venture Capital is for, and Venture Capital works just fine without forcefully taking money from taxpayers.
Your mentality seems to be that this money appears from nowhere, but it doesn't, for a government to give money to one person, that money must be taken from another. Taxation is the main thing stifling European businesses, not the lack of corporate welfare.
Re:It's not waste of tax payers money (Score:4, Informative)
As what comes to Europes economic growth and it's businesses, taxation or it's rate are not to be blamed. Yes, in some countries like German the tax laws are a mess, but all in all they are pretty workable. What does instead stifle businesses are work laws, or more on inflexibility in the job market: French and Germany come to a mind quick. If I would start from somewhere, it would changes to free job markets not stifle working government private sector partnership that does bring food on the table
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
http://www.paulgraham.com/inequality.html [paulgraham.com]
Re: (Score:2)
It is very unlikely that Airbus could have ever gotten off the ground without EU financial support. The WTO agreements lay out what is appropriate and inappropriate governmental intervention in trade. The US opinion is that the EU directly supporting Airbus (and probably this project as well - if it ever matures) is inappropriate.
OTOH, I have no idea how it differs from the the US giving public grants
Re: (Score:2)
But there is plenty of innovation in Germany, and if the current tax structure and barriers to entry are what it takes to keep it from becoming like America... then keep them.
Next generation search technology (Score:5, Interesting)
* Grub article [slashdot.org] (now defunct)- was distributed peer-to-peer crawler. (see also [archive.org])
* Boitho [boitho.com], another distributed crawler
* YaCy [yacy.net]- another peer-to-peer crawler
* How to build a web spider [slashdot.org]
* C++ web crawler lib [sourceforge.net]
* LibWWW [linpro.no] (perl)
* W3C's WebBot [w3.org]
* The Internet Archive's Heritrix [archive.org] crawler
* WebSPHINX- customizable crawler [cmu.edu]
Somehow, this is like an extension of surfraw [sf.net]. I imagine that soon enough we will start up an open source crawler-browsing hybrid software package, though have been surprised that nothing like it has popped up yet- it's (usually) the way of the programmer to make sure that he has the ability to do what the giants are doing. Maybe we have all been collectively blinded by graphical web browsers (IE, Firefox, Opera, etc.) and "click-click-click" thinkware?
knockoffs, and how to compete (Score:5, Insightful)
The lesson Europe needs to learn is that the way to compete with the USA is not by trying to copy everything the USA does (google, GPS systems, operating systems, etc etc) but with government funding. The way to beat them is to innovate and make brand new things, made by the people who are passionate about doing something new and will pour their hearts and souls into it. That's why the Intel, Google, and Microsoft started in the USA, and why the European knockoffs all failed. You can't drive it from the top down: you have to let it grow from the bottom up. As soon as Europe learns this, there will be nothing to stop it.
Re: (Score:1, Insightful)
Like MP3? Or the World Wide Web?
Re: (Score:1)
It is sad that today's kids are so advertised/brainwashed with the "achievements" of big businesses that scientist/engineers are looked upon with disdain. University enrollment in engineering and science reaches all time low. Everybody wants to be a banker or lawyer (or, if they have still some decency), or a doctor.
Something needs to be done to bring these kids back to doing useful things.
Indeed! (Score:1)
The fathers of the French Revolution are proud... (Score:1, Troll)
Certainly, it may have been transferred from old fashioned regionalisms, but from Galileo, to Qaero, to Theseus, these are all just continuing examples of the European Union seeing something that exists in the free market, is successful and, because they are American, they ipso facto need to be reproduced "by us".
Hilarious, and pathetic.
Re:The fathers of the French Revolution are proud. (Score:2)
Hilarious, and pathetic."
It's actually called self reliance. It's a bit of a security risk trusting both your nation's operating systems and internet searches to foreign companies, especially when you can count on so many searches going straight through NSA. There's an espionage risk in doing so, even if only indu
Re: (Score:2)
The entire point of interdependence is to prevent conflict. If we know we can't fight a war without them, we sure won't fight it with them.
The goal is to have fewer wars, and spend more time getting everyone's standard of living up to scratch.
Self reliance is the road to poverty.
I have no trouble with European tax payers financing doomed, and redundant projects that don't service any existing need. I would just hope that European's would have a problem with it.
Obligatory speculation (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Candide (Score:2)
Semantic Search Patents (Score:1)
Who? (Score:1)