»Djoerd and myself have joined forces at Radboud with the primary aim of our research to give people control over their information access needs, to let them understand how their search results are produced, to reduce the influence of adverising in search, and, overall, to make search more ethical.«

Arjen P. de Vries
Full professor of information retrieval and research director of the Institue for Computing and Information Sciences at Radboud

open-web-search-partner-_0003_ru_int_a4_cmyk_2019_cs_2

Radboud University

Prof.dr.ir. Arjen P. de Vries and prof. 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, we develop a new architecture for search engines where many parts of the system will be 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.

We also envision an Open-Web-Search Engine Hub, where companies and individuals can share their specifications of search engines and pre-computed, regularly updated search indices. We think of this as a search engine mash-up, that would enable a new future of human-centric search without privacy concerns.

Website: cs.ru.nl

Arjen P. de Vries is professor of Information Retrieval and research director of the Institute of Computing and Information Sciences.at Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands. His research aims to resolve the question how users and systems may cooperate to improve information access, with a specific focus on the value of a combination of structured and unstructured information representations. He is a founding member of Spinque, a company that integrates databases and information retrieval to develop search solutions with and for information specialists.