The watchdog of European Union’s competition has approved the use of £76m of French state aid for a consortium in an attempt to build a comprehensive Internet search engine to take on search engine giant Google.

The Quaero project is a coalition of 23 firm that are led by French technology major Thomson. However, a lack of enough funding has meant the search engine project, which is Latin for ‘I seek’, is still in the conceptual stage. However, it will now finally get up & running owing to support from France. The nation has championed the scheme. The European Commission announced after an ‘in-depth examination’ that, he Quaero project would bring various positive externalities ‘for the community as a whole’.

Quaero “is not spontaneously underpinned by the market largely owing to divergent interests that are there within the consortium & also to uncertainties regarding the project’s chances of success,” the EU’s executive arm stated in a release. The consortium intends to make the Quaero engine available for PCs, cell phones, TVs and other new-age media platforms. The project was first unveiled in 2005 by the then French president Jacques Chirac. He had termed it a ‘Franco-German attempt’ for competing with Google.