It wasn't to compete with Google: "Quaero was not intended to be a text-based search engine but was mainly meant for multimedia search." - https://en.wikipedia.

It wasn't to compete with Google: "Quaero was not intended to be a text-based search engine but was mainly meant for multimedia search." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaero https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaero. Its budget was also less than 1% of this chip initiative's.