France Targets American Ingenuity

It's been said that the problem with France's economy is that there is no French word for "entrepreneur." In a tacit acknowledgment of that axiom, the country's president yesterday triumphantly announced plans to revitalize his country's limping economy with $2.1 billion worth of industrial projects. First among them is a new French search engine that he hopes will rival Google.

The announcement suggests that President Chirac and his crew do not understand why Google is successful. After Mr. Chirac announced plans for the initiative last year, his culture minister, Renaud Donnedieu de Vabres, turned up his nose at Google. "I do not believe," he wrote in Le Monde, "that the only key to access our culture should be the automatic ranking by popularity, which has been behind Google's success."

Incredibly, the head of France's Bibliotheque Nationale, Jean-Noel Jeanneney, has suggested that a "committee of experts" should replace Google's idea of relying on the aggregate wisdom of every Internet user.

Google is a revolutionary concept. It is the world's ultimate democracy - and it was created in a free-market, capitalist economy. Perhaps the French have another kind of search engine in mind: one that goes on strike at a moment's notice, doesn't work in August, and freezes up if a user even suggests he might want to try an American Web site at some point in the future.

Even with this kind of innovation, there's one more hurdle to French search-engine domination. When searching "entrepreneur" on Google.fr - the site already used for almost three out of four French Internet searches - you'll first be directed to Microsoft.com.