According to Guardian Unlimited story, Does France really need its own search engine?, by Bobbie Johnson (April 27, 2006), France is backing a Franco-German challenger to Google called Quaero. If they build it will users switch? How could Quaero duplicate the success of Baidu.com in challenging Google in China? I’m guessing that if Google’s search techniques is based on features of English, Quaero could compete by handling French searches better. The Wikipedia article on Quaero says they will focus on multimedia search.