Led by search technologists Pieter van der Linden and Henri Gouraurd, the team behind Quaero has set to develop technology that can find,
manipulate and process multilingual multimedia content -- and better allow its users to do things with said content.
Van der Linden and Gourard recently gave a presentation on the
progress of Quaero, outlining the 6 application-specific areas that were being worked on. Technologists from both private and public sector entities like Exalead, Bertin Technologies and Karlsruche
University were tackling the tasks of content security (like A/V fingerprinting), automated aggregation and tagging of meta-data, classic search and extraction, as well as crafting both the user
interface and building the actual infrastructure behind such large volumes of data storage.
Whether Quaero actually pans out into a search engine remains to be seen, but it's clear that the EU entities are making heavy investments (both in time and budgets) for innovation in the space.