3quarks brings us the sad tale of another loss for the French. This time, it seems ils tout seul le font when it comes to search engines.

The war waged by French president Jacques Chirac against “Anglo-Saxon” cultural imperialism suffered a blow today when the Germans announced they were pulling out of a rival European search engine to Google.

Earlier this year Mr Chirac announced a series of ambitious technological projects designed to challenge the global dominance of the US. They included Quaero, a Franco-German search engine whose name is Latin for “I search”, but which was swiftly dubbed “Ask Chirac”.

Today German officials confirmed they were abandoning the €400m (£270m) project. Senior officials in Germany’s economics and technology ministry said they had decided to dump Quaero because they had been sceptical it would ever be able to challenge the might of Google and Yahoo!

Cooperation with France had “not been simple,” they said. Asked today what had gone wrong, a ministry spokeswoman told the Guardian: “There were disagreements. The French wanted a search engine. We wanted something else.”

Instead, Germany has now decided to launch its own national search engine, Theseus.

This sort of development is important, for lots of reasons. Let’s face it, most of us are rather lazy, and if the page isn’t in English (or our first language) we tend to move on. Finding reliable translating tools is getting easier, but they don’t always satisfy. But it’s true that there is a a skew towards English on the net, thus shutting out large numbers of non-English speakers from the world of the intertubes. The French also have a valid point about “cultural imperialism,” and I can agree that it would be nice if more of the web were “multicultural” and included several languages for any given page. Ich nehme volle Verantwortlichkeit für das Versehen hier an unserem Platz. Anyone wanna read this page in Babylonian?

But seriously: is it a good or bad thing that the Intertubes are dominated by a few languages? Will English eventually emerge as “the” language of the net? Who here can give me a clue about how the world of cunieform speakers (Mandarin, Japanese, etc) works online? Does a single language on the net make sense, bringing people closer to being a true global village? Or does it just make it easier for English-only cretins to bring us all down to their level? Like it or not, a lot of the “wrong” forces (pr0n) drive the internet and how it develops. The French are a proud people, and I can understand why it is they don’t want Google to be the “one world” search engine, even as I agree for entirely different reasons.