Saturday, March 26, 2005

Europe's response to Google to be managed by... Microsoft?: From Le Monde: Dans l'esprit du chef de l'Etat, il s'agit de bâtir un "alter ego" au projet américain, avant d'envisager une éventuelle collaboration avec Google, pour ne pas discuter en situation de faiblesse. Le président serait-il prêt à s'entretenir avec le concurrent de Google, Microsoft, puisqu'il a tant de convergences de vues avec son président, Bill Gates, qu'il a longuement reçu à l'Elysée ? "Pourquoi pas ?", répondent les conseillers de M. Chirac. In the mind of the chief of state, it's a question of building an alter ego to the american project, before thinking of an eventual collaboration with Google, so as not to negotiate from a position of weakness. Would the president be ready to make a deal with Google's competitor, Microsoft, since he has so many views in common with its president, Bill Gates, whom he has long welcomed to the Elysée? "Why not?", respond M. Chirac's advisors. (translation by Mark Liberman) (Via Language Log.) What is the value of creating a separate search engine for the contents of European libraries? While specialized repositories and search engines like arXiv and CiteSeer have had great value in making accessible new kinds of material with richer metadata, they have become much more valuable since their content has been indexed by wide coverage search engines. A wide coverage search engine aggregates documents from a multitude of sources, delivering o the user far more than the user would be able to find by separately querying individual repositories. Will the European project be open to search engine spiders, even Google's? If not, it will be much less valuable, much less prominent, than M. Chirac hopes. In his anxiety about the possible dilution of French cultural production, he might create a "walled garden" with a small fraction of the visitors that an openly indexed repository would have. 1:30:49 PM