Professor Michael Granitzer (right), scientific coordinator of the EU project OpenWebSearch.EU, in conversation with his team at the University of Passau.
Globally, four search engine providers from the USA, Russia and China dominate the market and act as gatekeepers. There is currently no independent service in Europe. This is because “alternative search engines” are also based on the web indexes of the aforementioned gatekeepers.
A Europe-wide network coordinated by the University of Passau has set itself the goal of developing the basis of a European Open Web Index (OWI) as the foundation for a new Internet search in Europe. The project has been running for two years and a lot has happened since then, as the National Contact Point Digital and Industrial Technologies (NKS DIT) reports in its 2024 German-language Yearbook. It presents stories of particularly successful EU projects to the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) and the German public once a year. In the current yearbook, the OpenWebSearch.EU project is among the twelve flagship projects.
“This is a great recognition of our work to date,” says a delighted Professor Michael Granitzer, holder of the Chair of Data Science and scientific coordinator of the EU project. “I also see it as a signal of how important open and transparent digital technologies are for the future of Europe. With our web index, we are creating a foundation on which new, promising AI applications can be built.”
2.7 billion URLs indexed in 185 languages
Michael Granitzer, Professor for Data Science, coordinates the EU-wide collaborative project.
Over the past two years, the interdisciplinary research team coordinated by Professor Granitzer has developed an OWI (Open Web Index) index prototype. This is currently hosted via an infrastructure of four European supercomputing centres and is modelled with an open future so that new promising technologies such as AI applications can be taken into account. It is conceivable, for example, that different types of search engines could be set up, such as vertical search engines that focus on specific topics or an "argument search" that can provide advantages and disadvantages for certain search queries. The index prototype has so far "crawled" 2.7 billion URLs in 185 languages and comprises 400 tebibits, which is roughly equivalent to 191,000 photos.
"The collaborative, decentralised and interdisciplinary European approach makes a major contribution to a fair, open, diverse and free web," the yearbook entry states. The project consortium coordinated by the University of Passau comprises 14 partners from seven European countries. In addition to universities, research institutions and companies, associations that are committed to open and free Internet search and the information society are also involved. These include the Open Search Foundation, in which Professor Granitzer is active as co-moderator of the Tech specialist group.
As the project also raises many legal and ethical questions, the team has brought in additional expertise from outside by means of third-party open calls. Among other things, these defined points of reference for the legal framework conditions of an operational open web index and carried out studies on the economic viability assessment.
AI-driven web search in the focus of the coming project year
The project will run until August 2025. Next year, the team wants to develop ethical guidelines for the curation and establishment of the hosting infrastructure and explore options for its long-term funding. The focus will in addition be on the preparation of data for the use of AI-driven web searches. The research team is also aiming to further scale the index with the aim of covering a relevant part of the web and making the data usable in application scenarios for web search, AI and web data analysis.
"Our mission is to contribute to a fair, open, diverse and free web. We make the European economy and society less dependent on global digital players by enabling transparent and open access to web data - for independent search engines as well as for the analysis of web data and the use of AI," explains Professor Granitzer.
The European Union funds the project as part of the “Horizon Europe” research and innovation programme with more than 8.5 million euros under grant agreement no. 101070014.
Source: National Contact Point Digital and Industrial Technologies (NKS DIT)
This text was machine-translated from German.
More information
EU-project OpenWebSearch.EU: Europe's Independence in Web Search
For the OpenWebSearch.EU project, University of Passau has joined forces with 13 other renowned European research centres to develop an open European infrastructure for web search. The project will be contributing to Europe’s digital sovereignty as well as promoting an open human-centred search engine market.
Professor Michael Granitzer
How can contexts of meaning be identified in a deluge of digital media?
How can contexts of meaning be identified in a deluge of digital media?
Professor Michael Granitzer holds the Chair of Data Science. His research focuses on the use of machine-based learning methods and intelligent human-machine interfaces.
Funding statement
"Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or Horizon Europe. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them."
