4 ms·

EU taxpayers to fund $306m Google rival. No wonder the Yanks think we’re dumb.

27 points by paulsb 19y ago

paulsb 19y ago
Pathetic. This type of thing will never work. Let the bickering between the companies begin and watch the money be wasted. Instead of pumping money into playing catch-up with Google, they should supporting start-up enterprises that are innovating beyond Google. At least then these start-ups won't be going to the states because of the lack of support and vision in Europe.
- paulsb 19y ago
  I just realised that it is not even a fully fledged search engine, but a "multimedia" one: "Quaero aims to be a multimedia search engine that will work across all online digital media platforms including PCs, mobile phones, set-top-boxes and handheld devices. The engine will index content in several languages and will provide content management tools for media producers to promote their material." This is my favourite bit: "But after seeing that Quaero's German and French researchers were working in different directions, the project split in December 2006, with the French continuing to work on Quaero and the Germans focused on Theseus. Managers from both projects have, however, said they will meet regularly to form synergies when possible." Like I said - bickering.
  - Electro 19y ago
    Agreed. I have no problem with government subsidising businesses to help get them off the ground, because a lot of the time it helps them grow to the level of competing quite quickly; except French farming. However, no corporate group can ever perform well. One company running in a form of dictatorship over their product, like Jobs, can react quickly and, even for a large company, remain competative. However, if every decision has to go through multiple screening processes, tests, etc. you end up with a production cycle equivalent of Microsoft. The Quaero project is doomed to failure. Not only is it going to have corporate bickering, but it's going to be in multiple languages. You can bet a large number of coders will enter from the UK, Netherlands and many other countries. This means you're going to need translators to get the documents to read correctly in each individual language, or there's going to be many screw ups. Not only that, but you'll be faced with several days delay between project heads to get to a meeting. Bascially for a weekly status update, it would take probably 3 days to get everything translated and checked. So it's a weekly-3 status update, and what you did today is never going to be on the agenda, it's going to be the 3rd day on the next agenda, by which time something important is gone from your focus. I belive the best words to describe this are, eww, and, no!
- wheels 19y ago
  Yeah, this is crap, and honestly, it's more typically French than German. I suppose the political logic was something like, "What's hot right now? Google. Why don't we have one? Well, let's fix that." On the other side, doubly so in Berlin where I'm based, there is significant funding for startups available especially once they start creating jobs. We're planning on tapping that once we get far enough in. At least as best as I can judge, Berlin's one of the hot-spots for startups in Europe right now.
xirium 19y ago
Perhaps a gap in the market is emerging. 1/3 of Google's first 500 employees have already left and stock options will vest for another 2200 staff in Aug 2008 ( http://www.news.com/Life-after-Google%2C-with-millions/2100-1030_3-6226900.html http://www.news.com/Life-after-Google%2C-with-millions/2100-... ). Additionally, Sequoia thinks it is worthwhile to invest US$31 million in a search engine ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=134291 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=134291 ).
mtts 19y ago
The reasoning behind this idea, I think, is this: since the entire population depends on a search engine to do their work and pretty much everything else, search engines have become a utility and utilities should be state run. Much in the same way railroads were nationalized in most of the EU sometime during the early 20th century or even earlier. As far as railroads are concerned, it was probably a decent idea (not much free market competition possible there, really), but whether it works for a search engine remains to be seen.
- poppysan 19y ago
  Wow, government controlled search engines. Here we come 1984! Big brother does it again.
  - mtts 19y ago
    Except that in a democracy, what a government controlled search engine does with your data is more transparent than what a publicly held company (Google, say) does with it. Of course the EU itself is very far from being a democracy (unlike its member states) so I'm still not thrilled about the idea, but in principle I'm not opposed to it.
moog 19y ago
Innovation rarely comes from large companies - especially European ones. Big companies know this and don't care anyway... they can depend on ill-informed politicians and a general public who think Bill Gates is a really cool guy ('he invented the moderen world, don't ya know') to throw money at them.
- marvin 19y ago
  I agree. I'm from Europe, and I watch European companies get whooped by their American competitors on a regular basis. I do think we are better off with subsidized businesses (they prevent monopolies, which are bad), but there aren't many European corporations who both get governmental support and happen to be the world leader in whatever they do. I doubt there's even one.
  - papersmith 19y ago
    You guys do make the best and most popular trains for export (ie. Siemens and Alstom). Alstom's TGV also consistently holds world record in speed.
  - dualogy 19y ago
    "subsidized businesses (they prevent monopolies, which are bad)" I always like it how the biggest monopolist ever (in my native Germany monopolizing or near-monopolizing by force education, transport, health care etc) is so eager and capable of "preventing evil monopolys" out of other peoples funds. Very protective. I feel so secure. shudder ;)
    - pmjordan 19y ago
      You've clearly never had to use UK public transport. Living there for 5 years made me appreciate just how awesome transport is in Austria. Market forces don't seem to work for trains. I think infrastructure is one of the few things (the only thing?) that is better off regulated.
      - rhyso 19y ago
mixmax 19y ago
This is very typical of the EU, and a major factor in why Europe often falls behind the US in innovation. The basic difference is that the EU believes that state funding will solve the problem of innovation, while the US relies more on capitalism and market forces. As we saw in the Soviet era not much good comes from letting the state decide who gets the money. More recently France even tried to to make their own state-run internet, owned by France telecom. It was called Minitel.
noonespecial 19y ago
$306 to get a head start? Its like they say, If one woman tells you it will take 9 months to make a baby, maybe we'd better hire 9 of 'em so we'll be done in a month. I think we're gonna need a new category of fail to describe this one.
adduc 19y ago
If Windows Live Search and Yahoo Search can't provide as good of results as Google (assuming they can't based off of Google's increasing market share), does Quaero even stand a chance?
mdemare 19y ago
Neelie, go get 'm! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Commissioner_for_Competition http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Commissioner_for_Compe...
agentbleu 19y ago
I live in france and before uk this sort of shit makes me sick like they really have a fucking clue in politics as to how to develop and what to develop in tech, fuck me the politicians in the uk didnt get fucking email until about 2001
- agentbleu 19y ago
  oh and you know they blew 600 million on a computer system to tie the UK health department together, (bog standard shit) didnt even work at that silly price.
nraynaud 19y ago
Wait wait wait, here in Europe, we are not strong in internet technology or tax spending, but we can do quite good raw milk cheese, and that's what IS important. More seriously, EU sometime mess up things, teh big way, but : 1) if you are about to mess up something, don't fail shy, fail big, make some noise. If you win, you deserve your bragging rights. 2) EU did actually create some quite good technology, mainly with EADS, ESA and high speed trains. disclaimer : I'm French. edit a more serious answer : what did the people around you told you where you started your venture ? I bet exactly what people here say to quaero.
ldambra 19y ago
They should have funded 306 start-up with 1 million instead. I'm european and I'm ashamed.
- pg 19y ago
  YC could fund 17,486 startups with that money. ($306 million is almost exactly the square of the amount we invest in the average startup.) Maybe you wouldn't want to spend it all on seed rounds. But $306 million spent well would be enough to make a startup hub to rival Silicon Valley.
  - scw 19y ago
    The $316m could accomplish much, but I doubt directly creating a startup hub. The drivers which turn cities into creative class meccas wouldn't be included, and it likely would face the same difficulties as the Middle East's education plans: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/11/education/11global.html http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/11/education/11global.html It would a powerful change if groups like Gates' (http://online.wsj.com/public/article_print/SB120113473219511791.html http://online.wsj.com/public/article_print/SB120113473219511...) began investing in the efforts which have the best chance of the results they're seeking: startups. I'm guessing the startup model is antithetical to what BillsG sees as the answer, which is unfortunate.
    - pg 19y ago
      Obviously I'd choose whatever town was most SF-like. Suppose only 1/10 of the startups lived (a very conservative assumption). Don't you think a city with 1749 startups in it would feel like a startup hub?
  - Tichy 19y ago
    Would you (pg) scale to 17486 startups, though? Anyway, I loathe this waste of tax money.
    - pg 19y ago
      Not directly. But if I (a) worked on nothing else, (b) did it over 10 years, and (c) trained the earlier founders to help the later ones, I could just about manage it.
Hexstream 19y ago
From the "Throw Money at the Problem" dept.
eusman 19y ago
doesn't even worth it to comment
rglovejoy 19y ago
Will they be running Quaero on a fifth-generation computer? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_generation_computer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_generation_computer
tlrobinson 19y ago
First Galileo (the EU's GPS alternative), now this. Do Europeans enjoy wasting taxpayer money on duplicating perfectly good solutions in the name of nationalism?
aswanson 19y ago
What happened to Europe? Before the middle of the last century, it was the center of everything, innovation included. How did it lose so much so fast?
- pg 19y ago
  I think the US was ahead economically by around 1900. Scholarship tends to lag by a generation or two. Very interesting question though, and one I've thought about a lot, coming from Europe to the US as a kid. It's possible that Europe may have only lost relatively. I.e. Europe may not have fallen so much as that other places have risen. The single biggest problem with Europe may be government. There's a tradition in most northern European countries of strong central government. And the growth of technology in the 19c made it possible for a hands-on central government to be very much more hands-on. This seems to have had a disastrous effect on certain kinds of economic growth. Remember too that Europe had two huge wars go through it during the 20th century. That can't have helped.
  - davidw 19y ago
    > Europe may not have fallen so much as that other places have risen. Right. There are tons of cool things in tech (Linux, Python, Mysql, Qt/KDE, off the top of my head) and the sciences in Europe, just that there are more in the US.
aswanson 19y ago
One a related note, can the government aid basic research here in the U.S. (NSF, NIH, etc.) or are the agencies dispensing that money too bureacratic as well? Here are some numbers: http://dellweb.bfa.nsf.gov/Top50Inst2/default.asp http://dellweb.bfa.nsf.gov/Top50Inst2/default.asp

27 points by paulsb 19y ago

Pathetic. This type of thing will never work. Let the bickering between the companies begin and watch the money be wasted. Instead of pumping money into playing catch-up with Google, they should supporting start-up enterprises that are innovating beyond Google. At least then these start-ups won't be going to the states because of the lack of support and vision in Europe.

paulsb 19y ago
I just realised that it is not even a fully fledged search engine, but a "multimedia" one: "Quaero aims to be a multimedia search engine that will work across all online digital media platforms including PCs, mobile phones, set-top-boxes and handheld devices. The engine will index content in several languages and will provide content management tools for media producers to promote their material." This is my favourite bit: "But after seeing that Quaero's German and French researchers were working in different directions, the project split in December 2006, with the French continuing to work on Quaero and the Germans focused on Theseus. Managers from both projects have, however, said they will meet regularly to form synergies when possible." Like I said - bickering.
- Electro 19y ago
  Agreed. I have no problem with government subsidising businesses to help get them off the ground, because a lot of the time it helps them grow to the level of competing quite quickly; except French farming. However, no corporate group can ever perform well. One company running in a form of dictatorship over their product, like Jobs, can react quickly and, even for a large company, remain competative. However, if every decision has to go through multiple screening processes, tests, etc. you end up with a production cycle equivalent of Microsoft. The Quaero project is doomed to failure. Not only is it going to have corporate bickering, but it's going to be in multiple languages. You can bet a large number of coders will enter from the UK, Netherlands and many other countries. This means you're going to need translators to get the documents to read correctly in each individual language, or there's going to be many screw ups. Not only that, but you'll be faced with several days delay between project heads to get to a meeting. Bascially for a weekly status update, it would take probably 3 days to get everything translated and checked. So it's a weekly-3 status update, and what you did today is never going to be on the agenda, it's going to be the 3rd day on the next agenda, by which time something important is gone from your focus. I belive the best words to describe this are, eww, and, no!
wheels 19y ago
Yeah, this is crap, and honestly, it's more typically French than German. I suppose the political logic was something like, "What's hot right now? Google. Why don't we have one? Well, let's fix that." On the other side, doubly so in Berlin where I'm based, there is significant funding for startups available especially once they start creating jobs. We're planning on tapping that once we get far enough in. At least as best as I can judge, Berlin's one of the hot-spots for startups in Europe right now.

xirium 19y ago

Perhaps a gap in the market is emerging. 1/3 of Google's first 500 employees have already left and stock options will vest for another 2200 staff in Aug 2008 ( http://www.news.com/Life-after-Google%2C-with-millions/2100-1030_3-6226900.html http://www.news.com/Life-after-Google%2C-with-millions/2100-... ). Additionally, Sequoia thinks it is worthwhile to invest US$31 million in a search engine ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=134291 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=134291 ).

mtts 19y ago

The reasoning behind this idea, I think, is this: since the entire population depends on a search engine to do their work and pretty much everything else, search engines have become a utility and utilities should be state run. Much in the same way railroads were nationalized in most of the EU sometime during the early 20th century or even earlier. As far as railroads are concerned, it was probably a decent idea (not much free market competition possible there, really), but whether it works for a search engine remains to be seen.

poppysan 19y ago
Wow, government controlled search engines. Here we come 1984! Big brother does it again.
- mtts 19y ago
  Except that in a democracy, what a government controlled search engine does with your data is more transparent than what a publicly held company (Google, say) does with it. Of course the EU itself is very far from being a democracy (unlike its member states) so I'm still not thrilled about the idea, but in principle I'm not opposed to it.

moog 19y ago

Innovation rarely comes from large companies - especially European ones. Big companies know this and don't care anyway... they can depend on ill-informed politicians and a general public who think Bill Gates is a really cool guy ('he invented the moderen world, don't ya know') to throw money at them.

marvin 19y ago
I agree. I'm from Europe, and I watch European companies get whooped by their American competitors on a regular basis. I do think we are better off with subsidized businesses (they prevent monopolies, which are bad), but there aren't many European corporations who both get governmental support and happen to be the world leader in whatever they do. I doubt there's even one.
- papersmith 19y ago
  You guys do make the best and most popular trains for export (ie. Siemens and Alstom). Alstom's TGV also consistently holds world record in speed.
- dualogy 19y ago
  "subsidized businesses (they prevent monopolies, which are bad)" I always like it how the biggest monopolist ever (in my native Germany monopolizing or near-monopolizing by force education, transport, health care etc) is so eager and capable of "preventing evil monopolys" out of other peoples funds. Very protective. I feel so secure. shudder ;)
  - pmjordan 19y ago
    You've clearly never had to use UK public transport. Living there for 5 years made me appreciate just how awesome transport is in Austria. Market forces don't seem to work for trains. I think infrastructure is one of the few things (the only thing?) that is better off regulated.
    - rhyso 19y ago

mixmax 19y ago

This is very typical of the EU, and a major factor in why Europe often falls behind the US in innovation. The basic difference is that the EU believes that state funding will solve the problem of innovation, while the US relies more on capitalism and market forces. As we saw in the Soviet era not much good comes from letting the state decide who gets the money. More recently France even tried to to make their own state-run internet, owned by France telecom. It was called Minitel.

noonespecial 19y ago

$306 to get a head start? Its like they say, If one woman tells you it will take 9 months to make a baby, maybe we'd better hire 9 of 'em so we'll be done in a month. I think we're gonna need a new category of fail to describe this one.

adduc 19y ago

If Windows Live Search and Yahoo Search can't provide as good of results as Google (assuming they can't based off of Google's increasing market share), does Quaero even stand a chance?

mdemare 19y ago

Neelie, go get 'm! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Commissioner_for_Competition http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Commissioner_for_Compe...

agentbleu 19y ago

I live in france and before uk this sort of shit makes me sick like they really have a fucking clue in politics as to how to develop and what to develop in tech, fuck me the politicians in the uk didnt get fucking email until about 2001

agentbleu 19y ago
oh and you know they blew 600 million on a computer system to tie the UK health department together, (bog standard shit) didnt even work at that silly price.

nraynaud 19y ago

Wait wait wait, here in Europe, we are not strong in internet technology or tax spending, but we can do quite good raw milk cheese, and that's what IS important. More seriously, EU sometime mess up things, teh big way, but : 1) if you are about to mess up something, don't fail shy, fail big, make some noise. If you win, you deserve your bragging rights. 2) EU did actually create some quite good technology, mainly with EADS, ESA and high speed trains. disclaimer : I'm French. edit a more serious answer : what did the people around you told you where you started your venture ? I bet exactly what people here say to quaero.

ldambra 19y ago

They should have funded 306 start-up with 1 million instead. I'm european and I'm ashamed.

pg 19y ago
YC could fund 17,486 startups with that money. ($306 million is almost exactly the square of the amount we invest in the average startup.) Maybe you wouldn't want to spend it all on seed rounds. But $306 million spent well would be enough to make a startup hub to rival Silicon Valley.
- scw 19y ago
  The $316m could accomplish much, but I doubt directly creating a startup hub. The drivers which turn cities into creative class meccas wouldn't be included, and it likely would face the same difficulties as the Middle East's education plans: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/11/education/11global.html http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/11/education/11global.html It would a powerful change if groups like Gates' (http://online.wsj.com/public/article_print/SB120113473219511791.html http://online.wsj.com/public/article_print/SB120113473219511...) began investing in the efforts which have the best chance of the results they're seeking: startups. I'm guessing the startup model is antithetical to what BillsG sees as the answer, which is unfortunate.
  - pg 19y ago
    Obviously I'd choose whatever town was most SF-like. Suppose only 1/10 of the startups lived (a very conservative assumption). Don't you think a city with 1749 startups in it would feel like a startup hub?
- Tichy 19y ago
  Would you (pg) scale to 17486 startups, though? Anyway, I loathe this waste of tax money.
  - pg 19y ago
    Not directly. But if I (a) worked on nothing else, (b) did it over 10 years, and (c) trained the earlier founders to help the later ones, I could just about manage it.

Hexstream 19y ago

From the "Throw Money at the Problem" dept.

eusman 19y ago

doesn't even worth it to comment

rglovejoy 19y ago

Will they be running Quaero on a fifth-generation computer? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_generation_computer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_generation_computer

tlrobinson 19y ago

First Galileo (the EU's GPS alternative), now this. Do Europeans enjoy wasting taxpayer money on duplicating perfectly good solutions in the name of nationalism?

aswanson 19y ago

What happened to Europe? Before the middle of the last century, it was the center of everything, innovation included. How did it lose so much so fast?

pg 19y ago
I think the US was ahead economically by around 1900. Scholarship tends to lag by a generation or two. Very interesting question though, and one I've thought about a lot, coming from Europe to the US as a kid. It's possible that Europe may have only lost relatively. I.e. Europe may not have fallen so much as that other places have risen. The single biggest problem with Europe may be government. There's a tradition in most northern European countries of strong central government. And the growth of technology in the 19c made it possible for a hands-on central government to be very much more hands-on. This seems to have had a disastrous effect on certain kinds of economic growth. Remember too that Europe had two huge wars go through it during the 20th century. That can't have helped.
- davidw 19y ago
  > Europe may not have fallen so much as that other places have risen. Right. There are tons of cool things in tech (Linux, Python, Mysql, Qt/KDE, off the top of my head) and the sciences in Europe, just that there are more in the US.

aswanson 19y ago

One a related note, can the government aid basic research here in the U.S. (NSF, NIH, etc.) or are the agencies dispensing that money too bureacratic as well? Here are some numbers: http://dellweb.bfa.nsf.gov/Top50Inst2/default.asp http://dellweb.bfa.nsf.gov/Top50Inst2/default.asp