The executive branch of the EU has recently approved a funding grant for the German government's next-generation Internet search program, code-named Theseus. CNN/Money reports that the initiative is being developed by a number of corporations, including SAP AG and Siemens AG, and aims to develop a search engine capable of understanding the semantics of a phrase and searching web sites accordingly. Semantic search differs from a standard search today in that the search engine would be capable of understanding the context and meaning of a specific phrase, rather than simply identifying and returning keyword-based results. Searches could therefore return results that are much more likely to relate to what the user is looking for and could provide more directly pertinent information in a smaller amount of time.

Although this could be a direct Google competitor, analyst Trip Chowdhry of Global Equities Research believes Google is more likely to cooperate and take advantage of the Theseus project's capabilities rather than go head-to-head with it. "I don't see this as a threat to Google," Chowdhry said. "Even if they do come up with a semantic Web, Google will index it and create searches on it like it does for Wikipedia."

Work on Theseus will initially be centered in a handful of large firms but should eventually be divvied up among smaller firms which will focus on particular research areas. Theseus itself was originally part of the EU-based search engine project codenamed Quaero, but it split with that initiative over disagreements about whether search development should focus on semantic-based text search or multimedia-rich search capabilities and advanced image-searching technology. Where Theseus is now moving ahead with funding and project announcements, Quaero's future is less certain, and it's unclear whether Quaero is capable of keeping up with Microsoft and Google's innovation record and aggressive time-to-market.