Many experts think that multimedia search engines, which make it easier to find content for online delivery, are one of the big business opportunities on the internet. In addition, they are seen as holding key positions in the future internet, which will take over many functions today performed by television. As technologies are converging, media companies like Bertelsmann and TimeWarner, software makers like Microsoft and online companies like Google and AOL are all queueing up to secure their share of this emerging market.
Bertelsmann, one of the two companies sharing the biggest portion of Germany's media market, has also become the world's top music production company since its music subsidiary BMG merged with the music branch of Sony, forming Sony BMG Music Entertainment. The company is in direct competition with TimeWarner, who just signed a 1 billion US dollar deal with Google, under which the search engine company bought five percent of the AOL online service. In addition, both companies concluded a strategic alliance. Like other big players, AOL is acquiring smaller companies specialising in multimedia search, among them just recently the Truveo video search engine and back in 2003 Singingfish, a company formerly owned by Quaero leader Thomson. Google has just launched the Google video store, with which it is marketing videos and movies over the internet.
Meanwhile, Google is attacking Microsoft's dominance in desktop environments by launching Google Pack, a set of programmes which bundles software authored by Google itself with replacements for Microsoft's Internet Explorer and MediaPlayer programmes. In return, Microsoft excluded Google from the range of search engines eligible for easy installation into the version of Internet Explorer to be shipped with the upcoming Windows Vista operating system.
Bertelsmann's likely decision to join the Quaero consortium is an indication that the European search engine will become part of these ongoing global 'search engine wars', in which the engine with the best value to users will win. In order to become this engine, Quaero will have to cater to a global rather than to a continental audience, putting a question mark behind the notion of a 'European' search engine to oppose the dominance of Google and Yahoo.
