INTERNET: QUAERO, THE "EUROPEAN GOOGLE" TO BE PRESENTED IN JANUARY.

Thomson is one of the world's leading owners of patents for digital compression technologies (notably Mpeg2 and Mpeg4). Quaero ("search", in Latin) was unveiled by French President Jacques Chirac at the Franco-German Ministerial Summit in Reims in April 2005. The project aims to bring together the necessary technologies to create a multimedia search engine, enabling users to source images, video, audio and text. Alongside Quaero, French and German leaders also helped launch the European Commission's digital library project. These announcements coincided with Google being forced to put on hold its plan to digitalise 15 million books in order to respond to concerns over copyright.

Quaero will not in itself enter the cultural battlefield but is a technological project designed to create a more sophisticated search engine than Google, dedicated to video, according to one project member. In an effort to counter Google, as well as Yahoo and MSN, Japan has also unveiled plans to develop a national search engine which will be backed by Nippon giants Fujitsu, Nec, Matsushita and NTT and the public broadcaster NHK.

Quaero will use advanced technologies for the transcription, indexation, and automatic translation of multilingual audiovisual documents, and for the recognition and indexation of images. Alongside Thomson, the first partners in this "digital Airbus" include Deutsche Telekom...

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