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By Andrew Redfern @ 14th March 2008 2:40 pm

Telegraph.co.uk : The European Union’s competition watchdog has appoved the use of €99m (£76m) of French state aid for a consortium attempting to build an internet search engine to take on Google.

The Quaero project is a coalition of 23 companies led by French technology giant Thomson. A lack of funding has meant the project – which is Latin for “I seek” – is still in the concept stage, but will now be able to get up and running thanks to support from France, which has championed the scheme. Following an “in-depth examination,” the European Commission decided that the Quaero project “brings positive externalities for the community as a whole.”

However Quaero “is not spontaneously underpinned by the market owing to divergent interests within the consortium and to uncertainties regarding the project’s chances of success,” the EU’s executive arm said in a statement.

The consortium plans to make the Quaero engine available for personal computers, mobile phones, televisions and other media platforms.

The project was unveiled by former French president Jacques Chirac in 2005, who billed it as a Franco-German attempt to compete with Google. However, some of the German development team split from Quaero in 2006 to pursue their own, “complementary” search engine, dubbed Theseus, which won approval from the EU watchdog last year for an injection of German aid.

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