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Quaero Headed By Bertelsmann

Bertelsmann will probably lead the multimedia search engine, the Quaero project

Project Quaero is considered to represent France's and Germany's response to Google and Yahoo, meant to lift Europe to the United States and Japan's research and development status.

France's contribution(EUR150 million) will come from the Agency for Industrial Innovation, while Thomson and the French National Centre for Scientific Research will lead the French part of Quaero.

Germany's participation is still unclear, though Angela Merkel's friend Heinrich von Pierer, Siemens chairman, is the Germany's coordinator in the multimedia search engine project, intended to provide navigation through the billion audio, video, text, and image files found on the www.

Bertelsmann's Empolis, the data processing subsidiary, will sign up this week, though officialy Empolis said they were only studying the Quaero project.