French president Jacques Chirac this week said France would help fund a new European internet search engine to rival Google and Yahoo and promised to counter the threat of Anglo-Saxon cultural imperialism, writes the U.K.'s Telegraph (via paidcontent). "We're engaged in a global competition for technological supremacy. In France, in Europe, it's our power that's at stake," he is quoted as saying during a speech. Chirac's plans to provide forgivable loans to a Franco-German "multimedia search engine for the internet" being developed by French group Thomson and by Deutsche Telekom. The program has been dubbed "Project Quaero" (Latin for "to seek").

Serge Travert, who is leading the project for Thomson, admitted that it was developed in part to counter U.S. dominance of the internet. Project Quaero does not yet have a formal budget, but will be financed by the companies involved and European governments. Some of that money will come from the 2 billion euro Agency for Industrial Innovation officially announced by Chirac during his speech.

The French government has also been pushing to create an online digital library to rival the one planned by Google.

"Culture is not merchandise, and it cannot be left to the blind forces of the market," Chirac said in a speech earlier this year giving the go-ahead for work to begin on a digital library of European literature. "We must staunchly defend the world's diversity of cultures against the looming threat of uniformity."