This week Microsoft decided to focus all its enterprise search development in Norway. At the core of this new effort is Fast Search and Transfer, a Norwegian company Microsoft bought earlier this year.

This development brings up the question on what it means to have a “European” search engine industry. There are no big Norwegian owned search engine companies left, but at the same time both Microsoft, Yahoo! and Google have established research units in Norway.

Why? Because Norway has one of the best search engine development clusters in the world. They want the brainpower.

My wife Susanne and I had the pleasure of taking part in a very interesting seminar arranged by IPTS in Seville last week. The European Commission is looking for expert advice on how to secure and develop European activities in this area.

Several of the participants felt that Google had become to powerful and that the European search engine industry was all but disappearing. Therefore, they argued, the EU should invest in a European alternative to Google.

Unfortunately, I never found the time to do a study of the European search engine industry when working as a researcher at STEP/NIFU STEP. However, Susanne and I made use of our experience from editing Pandia and wrote a position paper for IPTS, called “Is there room for a European search engine industry?”

The short answer to that question is yes.