Luke McKernan, Curator for Moving Images at the British Library posted this amusing tweet at a conference last year.

Aided by the pithiness of Twitter, Luke likened the doomed attempt of the Danish king Canute to hold back the sea to Europeana’s attempts to provide a European, culturally aware alternative to a Google.

In one sense, Luke’s comment hits the mark. Given Google’s accumulation of expertise, massive stores of data and sheer financial muscle, it will always be difficult for Europeana to match Google’s core strength – that of providing a search engine that points users to the stuff they want to find.

And while Europeana can point to a ‘long tail’ of aggregated content, some of Google’s spin off projects (such as Google Art Project or the Google Cultural Institute) achieve an instant user traction that Europeana will find difficult to match.

But focussing just on the portal…