Exalead’s Bourdoncle denies that there is any cultural or political dimension to the project, arguing that it is in any case more modest than Chirac suggested. “There will be no ‘quaero.com,’ no state-funded search engine, no goal, in the sense that there was the goal of an airplane for the Airbus consortium,” he says. “It is just a big research program, for the long term.”

What makes Quaero different from a standard-issue EU project, he says, is that here it is industry leaders, not bureaucrats, who define the objectives. That statement may be more a wish than an assessment, though, because as Bourdoncle himself concedes, the plan is now in the hands of the EU’s bureaucrats, who may well change it.

The designated industry leaders Bourdoncle was speaking of include his own Exalead, for search technology; France Telecom, for communications; Jouve, for scanning and other digital publishing expertise; and Thomson, for information technology. Those four, under Thomson—and presumably alongside their counterparts in Germany, including Deutsche Telekom and Bertelsmann, the publishing giant—will establish targets, perform research, and farm out work to other companies, such as van der Velden’s Meta Haven. Throw in the EU bureaucrats, the minions of the Élysée Palace, and the ups and downs of electoral politics, and you have something so loose you can just barely call it a confederation. Against it stands Google—close-knit, battle-tested, soon to be solar-powered, with a central idea and geniuses intent on seeing it through to the end.

Neither those geniuses nor their representatives deigned to comment on Quaero, by the way. But others in Silicon Valley were not so restrained.

Hal Varian, a specialist in Internet economics at the University of California at Berkeley, says the Europeans’ desire for “search parity” is understandable. “From the U.S. point of view, this may seem paranoid,” he says, “but it wasn’t so long ago that the United States was paranoid about Japanese supercomputer initiatives for pretty much the same reason: control of a critical piece of infrastructure.”

Varian adds, however—after disclosing that he has consulted for Google—that Quaero probably will fail. It will be “too politicized,” he says, and therefore unable to put users first. “How will Quaero handle searches for erotica, Nazis, politics, tax avoidance, al-Qaeda, Basque separatists?” he asks. “The temptation to intervene in such controversial topics will be irresistible, I think.”

Chris Tolles, vice president of sales and marketing at Topix.net (Zandica), in Palo Alto, Calif., calls Quaero a mistake, pure and simple. Tolles, a veteran of AOL Music Now, Netscape Search, and the Open Directory Project, has also done business with Google in the past.

“Fighting Google is not a tech problem, it’s a marketing problem,” he says. “Was competing with Microsoft in the mid-1990s a tech problem? Did other people have better operating systems but fail to win? Look, if you gave a user 10 results from Yahoo or Google, I don’t think he’d notice much of a tech difference now, but Google has a great brand, and they’re monetizing it better.” Tolles allows that it would be “neat” to search images directly, without metadata tags, but wonders what great commercial payoff would come of it. Plenty of European companies will take whatever money the government hands out, he says, and some may actually end up with something to show for it. Just not anything to trouble the sleep of Google’s Sergey Brin and Larry Page.

“I have a hard time believing that anyone can take on Google in its core competency and that if it were possible, it would happen in Europe rather than here,” Tolles says. “Let me be a Silicon Valley bigot: Silicon Valley will always beat Europe in everything technological, always. Everyone who’s any good in Europe will come here.”