Everyone Wants To Build Their Own Google: Add Japan To The List

from the government-sponsored-Google? dept

With the massive success of Google, it's been interesting to watch governments trying to get into the game themselves. Over in France, the fear that Google wasn't paying enough attention to French culture has the government there sponsoring their own versions of projects like Google's library scanning offering, and now the Japanese government is trying to jumpstart Japan's own search engine business. The government has organized a bunch of electronics, telecom and media firms, combined with Tokyo University and the Tokyo Institute of Technology to try to build their own Google. It's no surprise given the extent to which Japan has always tried to manage innovation from above -- but the stated goals of the project pretty much doom it to failure right now. The article claims that the want to "achieve equal footing with the US search engines Google and Yahoo!" within three to five years. With the pace of change these days, that's setting the bar way too low. You need to aim to beat both of those search engines by a lot if you want to have any shot of having an impact.