Germany is withdrawing from an agreement with France to develop a Google-beating search engine.

The Quaero programme was announced by Jacques Chirac in 2005 and promised a European search engine for PCs and mobile devices. The service was meant to provide better searching of audio and video content. Backed by the German and French governments along with Bertelsman, France Telecom and Deutsche Telekom it was meant to provide an antidote to Google, and US, hegemony.

German officials told The Guardian co-operating with the French government had been tricky and they were not convinced it would ever compete effectively with the likes of Google and Yahoo!.

Germany will now develop its own search engine called Theseus while France is expected to continue with the Quaero project.®

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