GOOGLE faces a new challenge – and for once it doesn’t come from Microsoft, the Chinese government or US civil liberties groups.

The global supremacy of the free-market American internet search engine is being challenged by a European consortium given E90m (£62.7m, $112m) of state backing at the behest of French President Jacques Chirac.

Quaero – the Latin for “I seek” – is the flagship project sponsored by France’s l’Agence de l’Innovation Industrielle set up last August with E1.7bn of taxpayers’ funds.

The aim of the agency is to promote European technological innovation, centred on key strategic industrial projects. It is also intended to be a vehicle to rekindle the French and German vision of Europe as a platform for economic co-operation, culture and international ambitions.

But unlike the other five launch projects for the agency, unveiled last week by Chirac, in biofuels, mobile TV, underground railway technology, energy-saving buildings and diesel-electric car engines, Quaero is close to fruition. The first services of the E250m research project, majority funded by industry, could be in service before the year end.

Quaero is intended to leapfrog Google, and other challengers such as Yahoo and Ask Jeeves, by introducing the capability for image and sound searches, in addition to the searches by keyword that drive existing engines.

A user, it is said, will be able to load an image from a photograph or film, and Quaero will seek others like it. Or, a searcher can play a recording, and expect Quaero to find other recordings by the same voice, or containing the same phrases.

This will presumably be a boon to the broadcast and entertainment industries, making it easier to search film, image and sound archives worldwide for clips or content.

But consumers are also expected to eventually find uses for the technology. Researchers on the Quaero project in France and Germany are also making multilingual functions a priority, in a bid to undermine the dominance of English on the internet.

Given the nature of the new features Quaero will offer, it is little surprise to find Thomson, the French electronics group, among the leading commercial partners involved. Thomson, which makes Technicolor and Grass Valley branded equipment for the TV and film industry, as well as film storage devices and set-top boxes used by home viewers, has a strong interest in the development of all aspects of video on demand.

Other partners include France Télécom and Deutsche Telekom, as well as German and French universities and research institutes.

But Google seems unfazed by the state aid – in the form of cut-price loans, advances, and so on allowable under World Trade Organisation rules – which is being doled out in Europe.

Inded, Eric Schmidt, Google’s chief executive, said earlier this month it was “a good thing”, because “there are beneficial consequences for our business when universities have more money and invent new things”.

Analysts say image and sound research tools are now among Google’s development priorities. Internet users, then, should benefit. But given past French state ­technology misadventures, such as one-time computer-maker Bull, a happy outcome is less certain for the French ­taxpayer.