WOWS Calls for Participation are open!

The international Workshop on Open Web Search takes place for the  3rd time this year from ..to…. As a side event of ECIR 2026.

The Third International Workshop on Open Web Search (WOWS) aims to promote and discuss ideas and approaches to open up the web search ecosystem so that small research groups and young startups can leverage the web to foster an open and diverse search market.

Therefore, the workshop, which takes place at ECIR2026, has two calls that support collaborative and open web search engines: (1) for scientific contributions, and (2) for participation in the WOWS-Eval shared task for collaborative evaluations of the Open Web Index.

The organizers are now calling for papers and participation (deadline 26 February).

Topics include 

  • Crawling for an Open Web Index, Collaborative crawling
  • Web deployment of search engines
  • Standards for search and Interoperability
  • Large scale web data pre-processing components or pipelines
  • Pre-processing and Enrichment
  • Indexing and Search Architectures
  • Open infrastructures for evaluation
  • Open source search engines
  • Open source replicability

To name just a few.

Find all Details here: 

https://opensearchfoundation.org/events-osf/wows2026/

OWS.EU Partner in Focus: SUMA-EV

SUMA-EV is the next partner we are introducing. The German non-profit organization is comitted to promoting free access to knowledge and protecting online privacy. It pursues these goals through conferences, funding and support of promising projects, and performing talks at educational institutions.
A central part of its work is operating MetaGer, a privacy-focused meta search engine that has been running since 1996 in cooperation with the University of Hanover. As a partner of OWS.eu, Suma-ev is a driving force behind the Open Web Index movement and played a key role in supporting the launch of the Open Search Foundation in 2020.
Phil Höfer, the organization’s technical counselor, contributes together with his team their extensive experience in running a large meta search engine and in processing search results from index-based search systems.

Thanks to Phil for taking the time to share your insights with us.

Please describe your organization’s tasks in the project. What is your field of expertise that you bring to the project?

Phil: SUMA-EV has been running search engine projects for multiple decades and has been working towards an Open Web Index during those years. We aim to further help the transformation of the OWI from research prototype to public amenity by focusing on adoption and application support.

How is the project progressing? Which major milestones did you achieve?

Phil: As the project nears its conclusion, we’re glad to see the pieces coming together. We’ve succeeded in integrating the OWI data into our infrastructure and built an independent functional open-source implementation of the higher search stack elements.

What are the challenges you have been facing (regarding your tasks)?

Phil: Developing applications against a changing data format was one of the main challenges. The same is true of missing documentation. These are common challenges when–so to say–building the rocket while launching it.

Which milestones do you plan to achieve in the remaining months?

Phil: My hope is that we can present a public-facing service demonstrating the ease of integration with OWS data before the end of the project. A part of that relies on fixing remaining compatibility bugs in MOSAIC and publishing our framework for working with OWS index data.

What makes the OWS project special to you?

Phil: Unlike with the failed Quaero project, this is the first time Europe has decided to explicitly push for sovereignty in web search and web data analysis. Only through this we can ensure availability and accessibility of web search as a public ressource.

Do you already have plans for the time after the project ends?

Phil: For us, the end of the project is only the beginning. While the question of how to keep the index going is most important, we also strongly believe that the index is useless if it isn’t being used. Thus, we plan to provide tooling and infrastructure to build search-related projects on top of OWS index data.

Thank you for the interview!

Read more about the SUMA-EV: SUMA-EV

Parliamentary Breakfast in Brussels with lots of food for thought

Earlier this month, a part of our team took to Brussels for a special occasion: At a Parliamentary Breakfast in the European Parliament, hosted by MEPs Alexandra Geese (The Greens/EFA) and Elena Sancho Murillo (S&D), we were given the chance to lay out to parliamentarians, accredited assistants, media representatives, researchers, industry stakeholders our reasons for urging Europe to implement a European Web Data Infrastructure – a crucial step towards digital sovereignty and competitive European Web services, including in the domain of AI.

At a get-together over coffee and breakfast, the event was kicked off with a strong statement by Elena Sancho Murillo, who emphasized that the European Web Data Infrastructure is a precondition for Europe’s AI sovereignty. In her view Europe must not accept that AI foundations be solely built outside Europe. Renate Nikolay (Deputy Director-General for Communications Networks, Content and Technology at DG Connect) highlighted that direct access to data is fuel for everything that is to be done in AI. Alexandra Geese stated that the Open Web Search Initiative is seen as a cornerstone of tech sovereignty but also for democracy in Europe. She therefore issued her concerns over the fact that the OpenWebSearch initiative still needs to look for funding in Brussels at this point, instead of being backed up in their important work regarding the European Web Data Infrastructure and the Open Web Index without further delay.

Economic need for direct access to web data

An industry perspective was presented by Per Öster, who spoke on behalf of LUMI AI Factory. He argued for taking back control over web data and using it to the benefit of individuals, industry and research. For industrial players the power of data lies in making use of it. It is important to be able to process the data.
On behalf of OpenWebSearch.eu, our spokesman Stefan Voigt called for a clear legal basis and secure long-term funding of a European Web Data Infrastructure, explaining the manifold opportunities such an Infrastructure offers for Europe’s SMEs, industrial corporations and start ups. To boost digital sovereignty and competitiveness, Europe needs to enable sovereign large-scale access to Web data and this is what the European Web Data Infrastructure ensures.

Pursuing a holistic approach

In a subsequent lively discussion various aspects such as the current legal framework, micropayments for publishers/content creators, the need for talents in Europe who can make use of data, data sharing obligations pursuant to the Digital Markets Act, and the importance of objective data for democracy in the context of a multinational and multilingual European Union were addressed.

The Journey continues

After the event our team used the opportunity to hop on countless elevator rides in the Parliament building to introduce the project to further parliamentarians and their staff at their desks. Fortunately the topic has been well received.
We are now following up with the aim to bring the European Web Data Infrastructure into the Parliament’s Committee on Industry, Research and Energy (ITRE) and the European Competitiveness Fund (ECF).

Our time in Brussels was a great opportunity to again highlight the importance of a European Web Data Infrastructure for Europe’s sovereignty and competitiveness. Its importance has been understood and acknowledged, but we also need to see some action now, especially with regard to funding.

Europe must act now – fast and boldly!

 

OpenWebSearch.eu offers entire web directory Curlie.org as free download

As of today, the huge human-edited web directory Curlie.org is made publicly available for download – thanks to the OpenWebSearch.eu initiative.

With over 2.9 million well-structured entries, Curlie.org is a clear guide to the Internet. The download now enables operators of niche websites to offer website catalogues on their topic. This is also good news for operators of alternative search engines. The trustworthy entries in DMOZ (Curlie’s predecessor project) have long been Google’s secret sauce to displaying spam-free and relevant search results.

The download of the Curlie database under an open source license is enabled by the European Open Web Search initiative via OpenWebSearch.eu project partner Leibniz Supercomputing Centre (LRZ). As of now, the provider of scientific IT services in Munich, Germany and Europe will provide a constantly updated dump of the entire Curlie directory.

OpenWebSearch.eu is already offering the pilot version of an Open Web Index, which contains roughly 1.3 billion website entries. This index should serve as the basis for an expandable search infrastructure that complies with European democratic values, legal regulations and standards. It enables the creation of alternative search engines that do not have to rely on an index from the big tech companies. 

Category data from Curlie.org is already integrated into the Open Web Index. Curlie data also supports the identification of high-quality websites and the corresponding guidance of website crawlers. Some 45.000 categories containing geographic labelling open the door to enriching location-aware apps.

For the open search community, the cooperation opens up new ways to judge information, says Laura Brown at Curlie.org: ‘We only include high-quality websites in our directory that provide useful information. This is ensured by our experienced and specialised volunteer editors in the individual categories. That’s the advantage we humans have over chat language models: We can assess whether websites are trustworthy. With Curlie, you can always see the source of the information.’

‘We want to enable free, unbiased and transparent access to information. By working together, we are taking a big step towards greater data transparency and data democracy on the World Wide Web,’ explains Michael Granitzer, project manager at OpenWebSearch.eu. The computer science professor at the University of Passau sees many use cases: ‘For example, the combined knowledge of the Curlie editors can be easily leveraged to exclude AI-generated websites from search results – or to flag them. This would give search engine users more transparency about their search results.’ 

The Curlie directory is now available for free download at 

https://curlie.org/download

OWS.EU Partner in Focus: Open Search Foundation

The Open Search Foundation e.V. is a European non-profit initiative dedicated to enabling independent, transparent, and democratic access to online information. Working in collaboration with research institutions, data centres, and other partners, the foundation promotes open web search as a public good. Its core activities include advancing search engine research, fostering cooperation, and supporting education in the field.

Dr. Stefan Voigt is Chairman and CEO of the Open Search Foundation e.V. and Coordinator of the OpenSearch@DLR project. Together with his team (Ursula Gmelch, Community Manager and Katrin Wellenberg, Science Communications Manager), he leads efforts to develop open infrastructures, such as the Open Web Index. These initiatives aim to promote innovation, support European digital sovereignty, and advance ethical and reliable search systems and AI applications.

Dr. Stefan Voigt

Please describe your organization’s tasks in the project. What is your field of expertise that you bring to the project?

Stefan: The Open Search Foundation has a networking, communication, and coordination role. We coordinate the work package on dissemination, exploitation, and communication (DEC), as well as the community building and outreach tasks. All in all, we network across different disciplines and bring the community together.

How is the project progressing? Which major milestones did you achieve?

Stefan: We think that the Open Web Search Project is processing very well. All the major technical and organizational goals and milestones were met. Together with our partners, we managed to bring together a large community of supporters and contributors, including computing centers, SMEs, and other organizations that use the Web Index and support the building and growing of the use of web data. The major milestone was the launch of the pilot Web index that the technical partners contributed to a lot. At the same time, we managed to engage several hundred people interested in this infrastructure and how it can be used.

What are the challenges you have been facing (regarding your tasks)?

Stefan: The biggest challenge that we faced from the beginning of this project was that this idea of a federated open web search infrastructure is not known and not yet well understood by many people, all the way from the layman on the street up to the policymakers. This means the challenge was to have people understand that not only a big hyperscaler from the US can build search engines and the underlying web index, but that it’s also possible to do this in a cooperative and federated manner across European computing centers and to have people cooperate and actually build such a web search ecosystem.

Which milestones do you plan to achieve in the remaining months?

Stefan: Since we’ve already reached the nominal end-of-project time and we’re currently in a six month extension phase. As said before, all major tech and non-tech milestones have already been reached. Now we use the remaining project time to further spread the word, wrap-up the developments, and get the idea transported towards policy- and decision makers at European Member State, European Commission, and Parliament level, so the idea can really make it to the awareness of the relevant people. In this way, it has a chance to be taken further, grown, and operationally implemented in Europe.

What makes the OWS project special to you?

Stefan: The OpenWebSearch.eu project is the backbone project of the European OpenSearch initiative. The OpenSearchFoundation has been working for many years to inspire such a project in Europe – a project that’s very close to the DNA of the OpenSearchFoundation and is actually the core of what we always wanted to achieve and what we will try to work on future.

Do you already have plans for the time after the project ends?

Stefan: Yes, of course. The project was an important means to get the idea of a federated web data infrastructure and open web search piloted and to demonstrate that it works. Now we have to take it to scale and make sure it gets further funding in European member states as well as from European funding sources, to further grow and scale the infrastructure and its uptake. This is what we will be working on in the coming months and years to help strengthen European digital sovereignty.

Thank you for the interview!

Read more about the Open Search Foundation: Open Search Foundation e.V.

OWS.EU Partner in Focus: The Graz University of Technology

As a partner in the OpenWebSearch.Eu project, Graz University of Technology, contributes its interdisciplinary expertise through the Cognitive and Digital Science Lab. CoDiS Lap explores the intersection of computer science, cognitive psychology, and human factors, focusing on digital literacy, decision-making, and human-centered design.

Within the project, Prof. Dr. Christian Guetl, as head of CoDiS Lab and Postdoctoral Researcher Dr. Alexander Nussbaumer, develop search applications together with their team – Chiara Ruß-Baumann (MSc in psychology), Sebastian Gürtl (PhD student in computer science), Felix Holz (BSc in computer science), and Daniel Scharf (Bsc in computer science) and ensure the integration of ethical and societal principles such as trust, privacy, and quality into the open web search infrastructure.

Thanks to Christian and Alexander for taking the time to share your insights with us.

Portrait of Christian Guetl (@ TU Graz)Portrait of Alexander Nussbaumer (@ TU Graz)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Please describe your organization’s tasks in the project. What is your field of expertise that you bring to the project?

Our main tasks in the OpenWebSearch.eu project is (a) to take care of creating applications using the Open Web Index data, and (b) coordinating work on ethical, legal, and societal aspects related to the creation and operation of the Open Web Index. The search applications should demonstrate how the Open Web Index is used for special-purpose search applications. The elaboration of ethical, legal, and societal aspects is needed to understand and adhere to them.

How is the project progressing? Which major milestones did you achieve?

In order to support the application development, the MOSAIC search framework has been developed that constitutes an out-of-the-box search engine that can deal with web index data downloaded from the Open Web Index. Furthermore, it can be used as a backbone to create more complex own search applications. For taking care of the ethical and legal aspects, a framework of technical-organisational has been elaborated that advises index creators, operators, and users, how to adhere to ethical and legal standards and mitigate respective risks.

What are the challenges you have been facing (regarding your tasks)?

The most demanding challenges are dealing with the legal and ethical constraints when creating and sharing web data and index shards. The main difficulty arises from the fact that third-party web content is downloaded, processed and shared with the public. However, web content can contain sensible and problematic information, such as personal data, copyright content, illegal data, or disinformation. Hence, various European laws have to be taken in consideration, such as copyright laws, data protection, or criminal law.

Which milestones do you plan to achieve in the remaining months?

The final milestones mainly include application demonstrators that showcase and document how to make use of and benefit from the Open Web Index. This should stimulate others to create their own Applications based on web data and the Open Web Index. Furthermore, summaries will be created that explain ethical and legal situations related to the creation, operation, sharing, and usage of the Open Web Index.

What makes the OWS project special to you?

Already in the early 2000s we had a first project to work on an alternative search engine. It was already at that time a distributed system and enabled in a flexible way to crawl web sites and build an index to be used by different applications. Since that time we saw a great value for an open search index and an open search infrastructure. The OWS project finally not only realized this idea but also scaled it up to a useful source for search applications, AI tools and research. Moreover, development on the global scale has shown that digital sovereignty on the European level is key for our economic and scientific landscape.

Do you already have plans for the time after the project ends?

Due to the collaborative effort to keep the infrastructure operative and providing up-to-date web index slices, we want to continue our effort to further improve the MOSAIC search framework and work on further search applications. The main interest is on science search applications and applications for Austria’s sovereignty on digital infrastructure, in particular working on Web search independence and data infrastructure for emergency management.

logo of TU Graz

Read more about Graz University of Technology: https://openwebsearch.eu/partners/tu-graz/

German computer magazine c’t writes about OpenWebSearch.eu

In its issue 21/2025, German special interest magazine c’t (Magazin für Computer Technik) features a piece on European digital sovereignty, mentioning OpenWebSearch.eu alongside the European Search Perspective as two promising projects in the European Digital Transformation process.

Author Jo Bager portrays the EU funded OpenWebSearch.eu project, that  was set-up in 2022 and is a consortium composed of 14 core partners.

The article does not fall short on introducing the Open Web Index pilot, that was publicly launched for R&D projects earlier this year, shedding light also to the similarities and differences between the OpenWebSearch.eu project and the European Search Perspective initiative.

Additional note from the OpenWebSearch.eu project team:
The OpenWebSearch.eu project is largely led by the University of Passau. The currently available Open Web Index is a pilot version in Beta testing phase. The project goal is to further establish the OWI as an open source “base to build on“ for a diverse & inclusive European Search and AI market fostering innovative and sovereign digital solutions.

Thank you to Jo Bager and c’t for picking up the OpenWebSearch.eu topic:
https://www.heise.de/select/ct/2025/21/2522307272282622570 

OWS.EU Partner in Focus: Radboud University

Continuing our partner portrait series, today’s spotlight is set on Radboud University in the Netherlands. Prof.dr.ir. Arjen P. de Vries and Prof.dr.ir. Djoerd Hiemstra lead the Information Retrieval research group at Radboud University, part of the Data Science section in the Institute for Computing and Information Sciences.

In OpenWebSearch.EU, the team, which is complemented by PHD candidates Gijs Hendriksen and Daria Alexander, have been developing a new architecture for search engines with many parts of the system being decentralized. The key idea is to separate index construction from the search engines themselves, where the most expensive step to create index shards can be carried out on large clusters while the search engine itself can be operated locally.

Another vision includes an Open-Web-Search Engine Hub, where companies and individuals can share their specifications of search engines and pre-computed, regularly updated search indices.

Having recently launched the OpenWebIndex pilot, we asked Arjen and Gijs about some key results and learnings thus far while also touching on some next steps for the remaining project time.
    Gijs Hendriksen, Radboud University, PhD Candidate

Gijs and Arjen, thank you both for your time today. Please could you describe Radboud University’s tasks in the OpenWebSearch.eu project? What is the field of expertise that your bring to the project?

Arjen: The Radboud University expertise is Information Retrieval, which is the core field of computer science that contributes to the development of search engines. The central question is how computers can establish the relevance of information objects for people’s information needs. We look into a wide range of open questions in the field, covering topics including the mathematical modeling of information (with and without new AI techniques), scalable and resource efficient system architectures, and, perhaps the most difficult one, how to measure the quality of retrieval systems and compare different approaches on their effectiveness.

Sounds like an ongoing tedious process. Have you found any key learnings for what works and what doesn’t in combining or comparing the various approaches?

Gijs: There were many learnings along the way indeed. Without going into too much detail, some of our key learnings are published as research papers and OWS deliverables.

How is the project progressing overall? Which major milestones are you proud of thus far?

Gijs: From our point of view, the project is progressing very well! After 2.5 years of engineering we are now running daily workflows that produce daily index shards from crawled content across three European data centers. Now that we are getting the data out there, we can focus on improving the ease of access to these index shards.

Could you elaborate on that a bit more?

Gijs: Sure. We are now working on improving access to the Open Web Index. A main part of that is deciding how we want to ‘shard’ the data, i.e. how we want to distribute the data across logical partitions that can be used to efficiently query a part of the data. Currently, we split the index into language-based shards, but we want to experiment with topic-based shards and even create shards based on frequent access patterns.
We are also actively investigating how we can best integrate shards over time. We are currently producing daily index shards, but have yet to decide how we can best combine these daily subsets, and how we should deal with document updates and deletions. Finally, we recognize that many people want to be able to query our index directly without having to download all our index data. We are working on a way in which we offer direct querying capabilities over an inverted file hosted in a data lake. This should also enable us to efficiently propagate updates to the index.

Sounds promising. What are some of the challenges you are facing?

Arjen: The main technical challenges stem directly from the scale of the Web, and the noisiness of Web data. The really big problem remains however that of evaluation. How do you establish the value of innovations in search without continuously running costly user studies? We are looking into mixing ideas from what is known in our field as ‘the Cranfield tradition’, with new developments in LLMs, and user-oriented studies to fill in where machines would fail.

What makes the OWS project special?

Arjen: EU projects are often a way for partner organisations to fund their own interests, resulting in internal project frictions (large or small) about the direction and final objectives. With OpenWebSearch.eu it is nothing like that. Everyone on the team is highly motivated to make a lasting change in the distribution of online powers, and such a broadly shared target is so refreshing!
We are enjoying it thoroughly to take part in this enterprise, and we are convinced that OpenWebSearch.eu will produce a lasting impact, sustainable beyond the duration of the project.

Do you already have plans for the time after the project ends?

Arjen: The brief answer is ‘Keep going’. Hopefully we manage to keep the team together, and find funding to even expand by integrating parties that have started to contribute actively to the Open Web Search and Analysis Infrastructure. And we will work hard to make the index a fundamental building block, suitable for others to do Web search research.

Thank you for the insights!

Read more about Radboud University: https://openwebsearch.eu/partners/radboud-university/

Towards a federated European Open Internet Stack – Conclusions from NGI Forum 2025 in Brussels

The Next Generation Internet (NGI) Forum 2025 took place in Brussels on 19 & 20 June, bringing together over 200 on-site participants plus several hundred online. Topics centered around the shift from research and experimentation to the deployment of sovereign, open digital infrastructures.

Over the course of two days, 37 speakers and panelists shared their insights and expertise with regard to Digital Commons and Digital Sovereignty, among which were:
– Dr. Monique Calisti, Director of the NGI Outreach Office
– Thibaut Kleiner, Director at DG CONNECT
– Prof. Dr. Michael Granitzer, University of Passau and project coordinator OpenWebSearch.eu
– Alexandra Geese, Member of the European Parliament
– Dr. Jan Hajič, Charles University and project coordinator Open Euro LLM

The OpenWebSearch.eu team co-organized the morning sessions of day 2 of the forum. The sessions were dedicated to the future of Open Web Search in the context of European digital autonomy in fields such as research, economic innovations, web literacy, data protection and AI. The sessions were moderated by Sara Garavelli from CSC – IT Center of Science, a Finish supercomputing centre which counts amongst the biggest in Europe.

Europe’s digital blind eye

Dr. Stefan Voigt, scientist at the German Aerospace Centre and founder and chairman of Open Search Foundation (partner in OpenWebSearch.eu) kicked off the morning with his presentation on “Introduction to Sovereignty in Web Search”. His entry slide read: “Europe is moving blindly in digital time and space.” Inspired by the Copernicus program, which was successfully launched by the European Commission and the European Space Agency in 1998 to provide a sovereign infrastructure for earth observation and geo-information services, Stefan demands the same level of attention be devoted to the digital infrastructures in Europe. “The current high dependency on digital information monopolies harbors dangers such as disinformation and censorship and is a risk for our democracy. Europe has to have its own capacity to navigate and orientate in the web“, he stated, pointing toward the recently launched European Open Web Index (OWI), as a federated open source solution, provided by the OpenWebSearch.eu team of researchers. Web search, he explained, goes beyond URL lists, but also includes, mapping services, e-commerce sites, recommender systems and much more. He closed his presentation with an urgent call for sustainable funding options to scale up the OWI and lay the groundworks of true digital sovereignty in web search.

In his opening keynote “The first European Open Web Index – Current State and Perspective” Prof. Dr. Michael Granitzer from the University of Passau reinforced the alarming situation in terms of digital dependency in web search, including in the field of opinion shaping biases. He referenced a study titled “Search Engine Manipulation Effect (SEME): Theoretical Analysis that Search Engines can impact voter behavior in the range from 20-80%”. 
His thesis: “The web is the richest information source out there, but we (Europeans) have limited access to finding and verifying relevant information. In addition, data from the web are important to train European LLMs. Even established AI Chatbots come with integrated search applications to feed the software with fresh data.” The importance of accessing web data directly and transparently was thereby underlined.

Granitzer then moved on to introducing the newly launched federated Open Web Index named OWI, which is a European answer to overseas web indices. Currently processing roughly 100 million URLs per day with a focus on European domains and European languages, the OWI is hosted on four (super-)computing centers across Europe, with the goal to serve as the backbone for building sovereign search services. It is open-source and transparent by design, and aiming to support digital services including in the fields of AI and analytics. 
However, both maintenance and development are costly endeavours. 
Additionally, the current legal and financial hurdles in transitioning prototypes to production-ready services, call for longer-term public funding frameworks.

Michael Granitzer at NGI Forum 2025, courtsey to NGI

at NGI Forum 2025, courtsey to NGI

Alexandra Geese shakes up the audience with an eye-opening Policy Perspective

Member of the European Parliament Alexandra Geese, who – among other topics – negotiated the Digital Services Act, spoke on the current powers in place and why these powers are opponents of democracy.

The Big Tech agenda according to her includes manipulating opinions deliberately and enforcing full surveillance. 
”They [the Big Tech companies] have the US government fighting on a diplomatic level, on an international level, through blackmail against any kind of regulation that we have created in Europe, to make sure that the digital services, digital products work in the service of citizens and not just of a few billionaires“ she stated, adding “The US government is threatening the European governments.“
She reported that some of the threats include visa restrictions to anyone working on the Digital Services Act. An estimated half of the European Commissioners thus cannot enter the US anymore.

Additionally, a global collapse of the international knowledge system seems to be a deliberate US choice. 

Attacks against universities and individual scientists as well as cutbacks on science funding support this notion. 
The focus seems to lie on AI initiatives rather than real science.
 Whether LLMs hallucinate doesn’t seem to matter. 
There is growing evidence that they are getting worse and one third of results is disinformation.

 “The algorithms promote not only a general distrust of politicians and authorities, but of experts, of science. Algorithms pushing rumors, propaganda and mis- and disinformation.” In the US there is a narrative that anyone who works on researching disinformation just wants to censor people, according to Geese. “There is no such thing as facts, just different political opinions. Anyone who wants to distinguish between high and low quality information would be a target of this narrative.” she says.

But Alexandra Geese finishes her informative speech on a positive outlook.
She calls on Europe to create its own digital sovereign infrastructure. “Whether or not Europe still exists as independent continent with freedom, democracy and scientific knowledge that makes sure we have knowledge, health and climate protection depends on that!“, she reflected.
The metrics are: open data, open standards, federating! 
 
She also made clear that “we do not want a European Google, we want a great network based on open standards.”

And steps forwards are indeed happening! The European Parliament voted to support technological sovereignty! 
The aim is to build an alliance between politicians, the scientific community and the European industry.
Alexandra Geese’s call for action was loud and clear: “Producing knowledge and making it accessible. It is the basis for free democratic societies. This is what we need to fight for!”

Alexandra Geese at NGI Forum 2025, courtsey to NGI

Alexandra Geese at NGI Forum 2025, courtsey to NGI

The subsequent discussion brought in Dr. Per Öster – Director Advanced Computing Facility at CSC – IT Center for Science (a partner of OpenWebSearch.eu).
Per shared about the start of the OpenWebSearch.eu initiative and why CSC – IT Center decided to join. “It was about research in the start, but the scope is much bigger. Every citizen does something everyday on the web. You research information daily. This information is totally controlled by few platforms. Over time how this information is served to us has deteriorated. Google is an advertising company at its core.“, he explains and added that what they present to us is a compromise between serving decent information and making money of advertising. In the end the advertising always weighs more.

Alexandra Geese reaffirmed: “The internet is going to worsen so much in the coming years, that safeguarding knowledge is a very important task.  
Additionally the cultural and linguistic diversity in Europe is not reflected by Big Tech companies. 
Our richness of diverse languages and cultures need to be leveraged. Cultural diversity is important for how we think and for our freedom.”

Panel Discussions on Open Web Infrastructure and Digital Sovereignty

The panel on “Applications of the Open Web Index and Web Data Infrastructure” brought together voices from Ecosia, OpenEuroLLM, EC-JRC, and CSC. Wolfgang Oels, COO of Ecosia, introduced the European Search Perspective, a joint initiative between Ecosia and Quandt. In his introduction he pointed out that “25 Million officials working in public administrations train foreign algorithms for free and this has to stop!” He argued for altering user habits and defaults as well as public procurement rules. He emphasized that better European alternatives already exist, but need urgent backing to scale up. He also reinforced Alexandra Geese’s analysis regarding the massive power that backs the current infrastructures; a problem that has to be tackled.

from left to right: Emmanuel Cartier, Wolfgang Oels, Per Öster, Jan Hajič, courtsey to NGI

Dr. Jan Hajič, Project Coordinator of Open Euro LLM and Professor at Charles University introduced the Euro LLM project, that unites 20 partners from research, economy and industry related research organisations. Euro LLM aims to integrate the 24 official European languages plus 12 additional regional languages. Jan advocates for clearer data-sharing frameworks to support LLM development.

Dr. Per Öster stated: “AI is nothing without data. One of the data sources is what is available on the web, which is why these platforms that have been scraping the web for years have been able to so quickly build these LLMs. 
The next stage of the EURO HPC Initiative is called AI Factories, which we are now planning to contribute to. LUMI AI (LUMI being one of CSC’s supercomputers) aims to continue to serve the open web index to the public.”

Emmanuel Cartier from the European Commission – JRC showcased the potential of EU tools like the European Media Monitor for supporting a trusted, sovereign information ecosystem.

Dr. Jan Hajič additionally adressed the current challenges with clearing copyrights for data, collected from the web – a topic that is also being investigated and discussed within the OpenWebSearch.eu consortium. Moreover, he added that Europe needs to stack up on hardware contingents.

The discussion on “Web Sovereignty – Towards a Sovereign Web Tech Stack for Europe”, moderated by Stefan Voigt, featured Ana Garcia Robles (BDVA), Gaël Duval (Murena), and Renaud Chaput (Mastodon). The overall tone of voice echoed a call for more funding, awareness, and strategic alignment.
Renaud Chaput, CTO at Mastodon, a federated European Social Media platform emphasized the importance of governance and maintaining Social Media platforms as public digital commons, as opposed to profit-driven ventures. Instead of bringing people into closed systems, Mastodon is built on an open system philosophy.

 Gaël Duval, CEO at Murena stressed that while technical capacity exists, market entry is hindered by dominant platforms.

All in all, the panelists agreed on a need for better governance, marketing, and education around open source projects. Users have to be at the center of the undertakings.

Ana García Robles, Secretary General at BDVA calls web data is one of the most valuable resources. She spoke on “volume vs quality“, stating that data diversity is important, as well as being able to process the „right data“ for specific use cases. Also, speed is important for economic success. Understanding market needs is crucial for the success of the web tech stack idea.

Voigt, Renaud Chaput, Ana Garcia Robles, Gaël Duval

from left to right: Stefan Voigt, Renaud Chaput, Ana Garcia Robles, Gaël Duval

Conclusions and outlook

The current status quo: Europe is a world leader in Open Source software but thus far has not managed to commercialize, monetize and disseminate these products successfully in ways that allow true digital sovereignty.

Web Search is still relevant not just despite, but because of the fast developments of LLMs that largely rely on up-to date web data.

Digital Commons including in the domain of Web Search require financial backing from EU institutions and national entities.

Dissemination of Open Source technology has to go beyond user acceptance, and create true user enthusiasm to make the shift happen.

A replay of the full conference day is available here:
https://webcast.ec.europa.eu/ngi-forum-2025-06-20

 

#ossym25 takes to Finland – Register now for the 7th International Open Search Symposium

In October 2025, the ever growing open search community will gather at CSC – IT Center for Science in Helsinki/Finland for its annual autumn meeting. For the seventh time, the International Open Search Symposium #ossym will provide a forum to discuss and further develop ideas and concepts of open internet search. Registration for the event is now open.

Discuss all things “open web search” and meet the OpenWebSearch.eu partners and community at the interdisciplinary conference on open web search. Organized by our project partners Open Search Foundation , CSC – IT Center of Science and CERN, the International Open Search Symposium will again be hosted as a hybrid conference from 8 to 10 October 2025.

7th International Open Search Symposium

CSC – IT Center for Science, Helsinki (Finland) + online

8 to 10 October 2025

Tickets are available for 200 Euros or 60 Euros for students here:

https://ssl.eventilla.com/ossym25

Discuss about all aspects of open web search, such as:

  • Open Search Architectures and platforms
  • Open Web Index and application domains
  • Societal and ethical challenges and solutions
  • Web Data Analytics and Web Mining
  • Large Language Models, Machine Learning and generative AI
  • Personalization and recommendation in search
  • Conversational Retrieval Experiences
  • Search engine advertising and business models in an open search world
  • Green computing and sustainability
  • Politics and governance
  • Economic dimensions, business models, applications of open search
  • Legal aspects of open search
  • and many more …

Information and Registration

More information is provided on the webpage of the organizer Open Search Foundation: https://opensearchfoundation.org/en/events-osf/ossym25/

 

About the Organizers

The Open Search Foundation e.V. has first initiated the #ossym in 2019 and keeps organizing the yearly Symposium in conjunction with varying partners. The Open Search foundation is a European movement to create the foundation for independent, free and self-determined access to information on the Internet. In cooperation with research institutions, computer centres and other partners, we’re committed to searching the web in a way that benefits everyone.
Motto: “Together for a Better Net”. More info on the website: opensearchfoundation.org

CSC – IT Center for Science is this year’s local on-site host. CSC is a Finnish center of expertise in ICT that provides world-class services for research, education, culture, public administration and enterprises, to help them thrive and benefit society at large.

CERN handles participant communications and data security. CERN is a European Organization for Nuclear Research and one of the world’s largest and most respected centres for scientific research. Its business is fundamental physics, finding out what the Universe is made of and how it works.