President Chirac of France is at it again, railing against the Anglo-Saxons, this time their dominance of the Internet. Now he wants to challenge Google and Yahoo’s pre-eminence in search.

Project Quaero, Latin for “I seek”, is his answer. It is a joint Franco-German initiative aimed at creating a Euro search engine. It will be funded by government and businesses in France and Germany. Thomson is expected to lead the French side, while Bertelsmann is reported to be Germany’s main player.

PC Pro comments: “The project’s aim is to provide search and indexing technologies that enable multimedia files to be searched ‘natively’. Rather than rely on text, such as the key word meta data added to videos for example, the Quaero would be able to index a video file by analysing the content itself.”

Judging by the ineptitude of most EU projects, the Googlers don’t have too much to fear from Quaero, except perhaps in trying to pronounce its name.