French president Jacques Chirac said France would fund a new European internet search engine to rival Google and Yahoo.


French president Jacques Chirac is to provide forgivable loans to a Franco-German “multimedia search engine for the internet” being developed by a French group Thomson and Deutsche Telekom.

Named “Project Quaero”, from the Latin word meaning “to seek”, the details of the programme will be worked out next month. Mr. Chirac’s government is also trying to create an online digital library to rival Google Print.

Serge Travert, who is leading the project for Thomson, says that the new search engine was developed “in part” to combat the dominance of US companies in the internet arena. He said the new service would not be built from scratch, but would be based on “science and technology that already exists in France and Germany”. Much of the content is expected to be European.

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