A spokeswoman at the French Agency for Industrial Innovation said it was continuing with the project to build a search engine called "Quaero" that would be able to index not only text but also photos and videos.

Some German firms would still be involved in that project, despite the withdrawal of others to work on the separate German-developed engine called "Theseus" that would be more focused on analysing text.

"There will be a French project and a German project, and as they are not working in the same areas, they will not be rivals but complementary to each other -- there will be two programmes instead of one," she said.

A junior economy minister in Germany, Hartmut Schauerte, this week confirmed that many German private sector researchers had broken away from Quaero.

French President Jacques Chirac unveiled Quaero with great fanfare in August 2005, and it was quickly presented as Europe's attempt to come up with a competitor to Google, a US company which has become the pre-eminent web search engine.

The project to build Quaero (Latin for "I search") was funded to the tune of 250 million euros (330 million dollars) and was to involve leading French and German technology companies.

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