21st
The EU-Funded Search Engine, Europeana
The EU has launched its publicly-funded search engine in Europe, and it was so popular at launch that it went offline for a bit. The interesting thing about this is that the EU has been worried that Google is making the internet too US-centric, so European governments proposed this EU search engine product to combat that trend. But this Europeana search engine isn’t copying what Google does, it’s focused on public domain content and digitizing books and other historical documents/artifacts/etc. The EU effort seems expensive to me, but valuable at the same time. I think the EU needs to figure out how to generate revenue from its publicly-funded search engine. Or perhaps run it like Wikipedia or NPR — where there are donation drives and sponsorships.
