Yeah: France and Germany started Quaero for a mere $2.5 billion, which seems similarly doomed to failure. Germany recently pulled out and have started their own project, "Theseus".
I'm not sure if I buy that Japan is trying to fight Google. That might very well be what the author of the article understood from the whole thing but to me it seems they are simply trying to support a move by Japanese companies into services. Adding decent search to a car navigation system is not exactly competing with Google. As long as they don't try to make a general purpose search engine I'm not sure if they are really competing with Google, just making their devices more attractive and differentiated from the replicas that South Korea and Taiwan are pumping out.
