A First Look At Quaero?

You remember Quaero, the (partly) public funded German-French cooperation to create an internet search giant? Two large german IT journals (ct and IX) are reporting that you can already see some version of their software at www.exalead.com (made by the French part of the project, the German part hasn't started yet). The site looks nice, has an innovative interface and some cool features (I liked the simple way to restrict results by location and/or language). But is this a version of the Quaro Software? I don't think so - Exalead is a project partner of Quaero, but that doesn't mean that Quaero IS Exalead. Another project partner has its own search engine (Singingfish) and the advertised main selling point of Quaero (multimedia retrieval) is not the strong point of Exalead.

So, we will have to wait a bit more until we can have a look at Quaero, but I was happy to see how capable some Quaero project partners are ... maybe it will actually work (I'm still very sceptical, but a little less than one hour ago).