Without a doubt Google is the leading search engine in the world. It has some competition but they can't even touch it, they just exist to be crushed by Google. The European Union is I'd say upset on the American monopole over the Internet so they are working for some time now on a project called Theseus.

The project is German and it will make use of web 3.0 which is basically web 2.0 + semantics. As the German project members say: "The semantic technologies are fundamentally transforming the existing Internet. In the ever more confusing flood of data, structured knowledge resources can be efficiently established and, for the first time, complex knowledge can be reproduced as well"

Theseus is set to be partially ready till the end of 2008 and for a faster development "the world's most advanced multimedia search engine for the next-generation Internet" will receive a boost of $165 million from the German government.

The idea is to fund Siemens, Deutsche Thomson OHG and Empolis GMBH to boost the project with later funding to be given to small and medium businesses to build on the initial research.

They have the technology, they have the man power, they have the money,  but what they don't have is the freedom Google has, they have to wait for approvals to do something they have to wait for the funds and so on, but maybe we will be nicely surprised.