We were sent an invitation to talk on the Forum on Quaero in Maastricht because the

Open-Search model offers a feasible and imaginative alternative to the very issue of profit and property – and the resulting politics – apparent in commercially operated search engines now. Conditions that deserve to be mistrusted and investigated (like your practice is doing) once an internet tool, like Google, gets increasingly perceived as ‘neutral’ or part of the given infrastructure of a system. Instead, citizens need to be made aware that here, choices are to be made, and can be made.

Besides the well phrased mission of Open-Search, the conference looks very interesting.

We are expected to give a talk on

Open-Search and its political consequences. Can – apart from the basis in decentralization, which takes away the central site of profit and control in the spirit of the original ARPAnet’s goal of removing the central location of data – Open-Search envisage or help constitute a new politics of the internet?

The Forum on Quaero prepares to address issues like this one through the spectre of what was, in the course of 2005, erroneously proposed as a public domain search engine, namely the French technology project ‘Quaero’. Although the actual practice of Quaero turns out to be a very different one – which we will critically address during the event – the question of the politics of search engines becomes all the more relevant.

Some of the issues to be addressed on the forum are:
* What role can the digitization of European cultural heritage have in establishing a European identity?
* How can a digital European cultural heritage/domain reflect the changing borders of Europe, and the national identities of the different countries that were, still are, or are no longer part of Europe?
* What kind of hierarchy (if at all) should be implemented when deciding what should go into that database, and what is out? Who decides this?
* Will contemporary web practices be allowed to tackle the conventional static models used to archive and present culture to the public?
* Collaborative and participatory techniques are effectively placing the Demos as the force that structures information. How can we work towards new categorization techniques that go even beyond the democratic model and allow plural interpretations of data to coexist and enrich each other?
* To what extent have search engines like Google, who started from the ideal of access to information, become the modus operandi of political bias? Is the double role of indispensable tool for public information combined with relentless private interest, in the long run, problematic? Can we envisage new roles for the search engine as public domain?
* What are the politics of the structure and image of search engines and their technologies? Does the nation state (like France) still have a role to play in this context?

Quaero: isn’t that the search engine that former French prime minister Jacques Chirac declared to be the European challenge to Google? A public alternative to Silicon Valley-borne commercial search engines, funded by the French state in the true tradition of the grand projet?
No. Quaero is not that.

Quaero is the name of a consortium of technology firms and research laboratories working together on multimedia and web search projects, indended to become products; it is a state-sponsored programme to stimulate private French technological competitiveness. But the questions that the idea Quaero raised since its inception – formulated by Chirac in ways never intended by those who worked on the project – keep haunting it. What is often considered to be a neutral infrastructure, much of the web is owned, administered and exploited by large commercial companies, to whose private interests it necessarily corresponds. Search engines are ever more indispensible tools, but are they, besides that, also the carrier of ideological, territorial and informational bias? Is there a political side to the search engine, the tool of which Quaero, had it be organized according to Chirac’s ideas, could have become a magnificent Titanic?

A public think tank around the politics of the search engine On 29 and 30 September 2007, the Jan van Eyck Academie, in collaboration with the Maison Descartes, Institut Français des Pays-Bas, organizes a conference departing from the French information technology project Quaero, its political agenda and the new frontiers that appear if its initial questions are to be taken seriously. Quaero, as announced by former president Jacques Chirac, is a state-sponsored effort to boost technological research and development. Yet it was launched under a political banner: that of counteracting and challenging the dominance of American companies in internet access and search technologies, and challenging Google’s efforts of digitizing the world’s libraries in an attempt to monopolize the access to information and cultural heritage. Such political ambitions are largely absent from the ideas of the dispersed companies and individuals working in the Quaero consortium. There is an enormous gap between Quaero’s initial rhetorical-political fireworks, and the techno-scientific practices now involved in its realization. This conference aims to bridge this gap by rethinking the politics of search engines. In that sense, this conference attempts to take the political side of the Quaero assignment seriously, including the questions it left unanswered. The Quaero framework could lead to the development of a new political imagination for the search engine. The conference is conceived as a forum that encourages audience participation and does not pose hierarchies on speakers; it is meant as a public think tank, a live sketchbook around new questions for the search engine.

Program