French Rival to Google Earth Goes Online, Gets Jammed Options

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A Web site sponsored by the French government that features a detailed aerial map of France went live Friday, rivaling a similar service offered by Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) Latest News about Google, owner of the world's largest Internet search engine.

Geoportail.fr was created by the French National Geographic Institute and features aerial maps of mainland France and of all the country's overseas territories. It is competing with Google Earth, the virtual globe program that carries images obtained from satellite and aerial photography.
Traffic Jam

"With Geoportail, France is the first European country to set up a common access portal for public geographical information," the National Geographic Institute, which is known as IGN, said. The Geoportail site was overwhelmed with traffic Friday, and attempts to reach it failed. The Web site of the National Geographic Institute, www.ign.fr, also failed to load early Friday evening. "It's just temporary," said Bernard Delbey, a spokesperson for IGN. "We are surprised and proud of the interest people are showing in the Web site."

The site can support 50,000 to 100,000 connections an hour, or about one million a day, Delbey said, adding that technicians were working to solve the problem and increase the site's capacity.

Geoportail reflects President Jacques Chirac's view that Anglo-Saxon culture is omnipresent on the Internet and threatens to overwhelm other cultures. The French National Library has put more than 80,000 books and newspaper articles online since early 2006 on a portal called Gallica, in response to Google Book Search. Chirac's office quoted him as saying, during a presentation of the new site, "It is also a case of economics."
Right to Know

"With Galileo, with the mobile telephone, services linked to global positioning will develop a lot," Chirac said, referring to the planned European system of satellites, which is intended to rival the U.S. Global Positioning System. "It is also about democracy, because our citizens have the right to know all the facts about the environment."

The state-owned French National Audiovisual Institute has put online about 100,000 television and radio broadcasts. That database and the French National Library's will soon be followed by Quaero, a European search engine created by France and Germany, and designed to compete with Google and Yahoo (Nasdaq: YHOO) Latest News about Yahoo.

Google Earth, which was developed by a company called Keyhole, was originally named "Earth Viewer" and became part of the world's largest search engine in 2004.