Google.com doesn't have a good record when it comes to the French. The 800 pound gorilla of internet searching has already run afoul of French media firm, Agence France Presse and French hotel chain Le Meridien. Now, according to an article in The Economist, (and thanks to Techliberation.com for the link) French President Jaques Chirac is calling for an alternative to Google.fr which currently accounts for more than 70% of French web searches.

According to Robert MacMillan at The Washington Post, it was Jean-Noel Jeanneney, president of France's Bibliotheque National that brought the Google situation onto Chirac's radar. Jeanneney had sounded the alarm to the French head of state about Google's ongoing endeavor to create a searchable online database of 15 million of the world's most prominent books, which in Jeanney's estimation (and MacMillan's paraphrasing) "constitutes the sunrise of an American hegemony over information and literature."

In an article in the International Herald Tribune, Jeanneney said of his reaction to the Google plan, "I am not anti-American - far from it...But what I don't want is everything reflected in an American mirror. When it comes to presenting digitized books on the Web, we want to make our choice with our own criteria." Jeanneney put things a little more bluntly in a recent interview with LeMonde (with link thanks to ICT Etcetera):

The real issue is elsewhere. And it is immense. It is confirmation of the risk of a crushing American domination in the definition of how future generations conceive the world.

The libraries that are taking part in this enterprise are of course themselves generously open to the civilizations and works of other countries ... but still, their criteria for selection will be profoundly marked by the Anglo-Saxon outlook.

...It would have meant The Scarlet Pimpernel triumphing over Ninety-three (Victor Hugo's eulogistic account of the revolution); valiant British aristocrats triumphant over bloody Jacobins; the guillotine concealing the rights of man and the shining ideas of the Convention...

Ahem. Well...hyperbole, nationalism and Charles Darney aside, the French seem to be taking action.

Culture Minister Renaud Donnedieu de Vabres has been put in charge of the French project, with Chirac's directive "to study how French and European library collections could be rapidly made available on the Web. The statement concluded: "A vast movement of digitizing knowledge is under way across the world. Blessed with exceptional cultural heritage, France and Europe should play a central role in this" (From the IHT article cited above).

Whether the French effort is based on good sense or simply extreme paranoia rooted in the reptile-brain collective memory of being conquered more than a milennia ago matters little. At the end of the day it is the researcher who will benefit, with more avenues of information on the table than he or she would have otherwise.

-- MDT

Labels: database