In North America, Google is seen as an information democratizer, in China, it is seen as something to be monitored and censored, and in Europe, nationalist desires to possess ‘best in class’, ‘in house’ technology cause Google to be seen as an entity to compete with, likely more so than anywhere else on the globe.

That said, European attempts to create competing search engines have been plagued by splintered financing and siloed efforts – a trend which we can expect to see continue, if a recent decision by the European Union, authorizing Germany to give $165 million to research aimed at developing a next generation search engine, is a sign of things to come. This sum pales in comparison to the deep pockets of Google, a company whose Market Capitalization is currently $162 billion.

The German funding, going towards the Theseus research project, comes in the aftermath of the breakdown of a larger consortium involving French and German firms, who had previously planned to work together to build a semantic search engine which would allow for the translation, identification, and indexing of audio, images, and text. The consortium project, called Quaero (which means “search” in Latin) was previously billed as “Europes answer to Google”. France is now seeking to subsidize the Quaero project on their own.

But with such splintered efforts, it seems hard to believe that Europe will ever have “an answer to Google”, as Google itself continues to pursue a growth and acquisition strategy which is heavily influenced by the firm’s desire to position itself as a leader in the semantic web 3.0 game.