This is both absurd and sad.
There is just no way that 30 organizations can work harmoniously together to build a Japanese national search engine. It’s hard enough for one company to build a search engine let alone 30.
30 organizations to jointly develop new advanced Internet search engine – MSN-Mainichi Daily News
I couldn’t agree with you more. It really seems like a little too much a little too late in the game given all the in-house work Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo are doing plus considering the acquisitions they’ve been making all along. I wrote a piece on this subject when the news hit the wires and the only positive aspect I could find was the fact that it would be open source-like (see: http://internet.seekingalpha.com/article/12071).
dang it I hate seeing the continuation of the government led “me too” strategy.
This is going to fail for all the same reasons as Japan’s attempts to build government approved networking protocols based on OSI and Japan specific “internets” did back a few decades ago.