Germans Bail From Quaero Partnership

France and Germany had great plans to take on Google for search engine dominance, but the French will have to go it alone as Germany withdraws from the project. Goodbye, Quaero. Hello, Theseus. That's the message from Germany's economic minister, who World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee has been a proponent of the noted that the French will continue to tilt at the Google windmill, however: "The Quaero file is not closed," said a spokeswoman for the French Agency for Industrial Innovation (AII), which funds research for the French Ministry of the Economy, Finance and Industry. "There are still German partners involved in the Quaero project (but) the configuration of partners will change. When you work on something international, it's more complicated than when it's just the French involved." Germany, it appears, has recognized the writing on the wall when it comes to contextual search. Their Theseus project will aim for the semantic web, which is just as well since Google dominates in European markets just as it does in the United States. Running at that buzzsaw