Quaero: The myth of the European search engine

Quaero (Latin: “I am searching”) was a Franco-German consortium project in which more than 30 organisations were involved and several hundred million euros were distributed as a subsidy. It would be an important scientific work to work through this. We have to deal with three Wikipedia entries
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaero
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaero
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaero
and with two small questions and two oral questions from the German Bundestag.
http://dip21.bundestag.de/dip21/btd/16/024/1602492.pdf#page=7
http://dip21.bundestag.de/dip21/btd/16/035/1603565.pdf “German-French innovation project of a European search engine Quaero”, http://dipbt.bundestag.de/doc/btd/16/041/1604102.pdf#page=12
http://dip21.bundestag.de/dip21/btd/16/046/1604671.pdf Current developments of the search engine project Theseus – formerly Quaero
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theseus_(Research Program)


Afterwards, funding was provided on the German side without a call for proposals:
Bertelsmann und verbundene Unternehmen (Konsortialführer: Empolis), SAP, Siemens, Thomson und verbundene Unternehmen, Deutsche Nationalbibliothek, Lycos, Verband Deutscher Maschinen- und Anlagenbau e.V. – Gesellschaft für Forschung und Innovation (VFI)mbH, mittelständische Firmen (morsophy, m2any, ontoprise, intelligent view, Pilot, 3D), universitäre Partner (Karlsruhe, München,Darmstadt, Konstanz), Fraunhofer Gesellschaft zur Förderung der angewandten Forschung e.V., Institut für Rundfunktechnik, Deutsches Forschungszentrum für Künstliche Intelligenz GmbH und das Forschungszentrum Informatik. (Bundestags-Drucksache 16/2492)

Supposedly, Quaero aimed to develop tools for indexing and managing digital multimedia and multilingual content (automatic information extraction, analysis, classification and use).
The research institutes used it to finance their third-party-funded projects and the companies financed niche applications. Practically nothing came out of it. The music search does not work as a demo, the image search provides more effective instruments on the Internet. Websites still exist, some of them already broken.
The most important thing for us is that it was not an attempt to develop a European search engine and the failure of this project was not a failure to develop such a search engine.