New SOURCE Project Launched

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The SOURCE research project (launched on April 1, 2026) makes a key contribution to the German federal government’s IT security research as part of the BMFTR research program “Digital.Sicher.Souverän.” (“Digital.Secure.Sovereign.”)

SOURCE stands for “Skalierbare, offene und umfassende Erkennung von Desinformationskampagnen im Web“ (“Scalable, Open, and Comprehensive Detection of Disinformation Campaigns on the Web”). The project is supported by the BMFTR as part of the funding line “Vertrauen in Demokratie und Staat: Digitale Desinformation erkennen und abwehren” (“Trust in Democracy and the State: Detecting and Countering Digital Disinformation”).

Together with our project partners, the University of Passau, the University of Kassel, the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre (LRZ), and Alliance4Europe (A4E), we were successful in the competitive tendering process for this collaborative project within the BMFTR research program “Digital.Sicher.Souverän.”

The focus of SOURCE is the development of a freely accessible database of potential disinformation artifacts. This involves utilizing web data from the Open Web Index and additional social media crawls, which are then analyzed and interpreted in terms of content and origin using AI tools. The necessary AI, cloud, and storage capacities are provided by a federated digital infrastructure.

The active Open Web Search community, as well as technical and editorial expert communities, are brought on board early for needs assessments. The communities are expected to contribute concrete use cases, which will be used to test, further enrich, and make the database content practical.

The data generated by the project will be made available to both the scientific community and users in the fields of journalism, business, and civil society, thereby creating a solid foundation for identifying and combating disinformation on the web.

The German Federal Ministry of Research, Technology and Space (BMFTR) is funding the project with €2,500,000 over a period of three years.

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Fighting the Search Monopoly with an Open Source Index: An Interview with Michael Granitzer from OpenWebSearch | Reset Digital for Good

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In a recent interview with Reset Digital for Good, Prof. Dr. Michael Granitzer, Chair of Data Science at the University of Passau and project manager of our recently completed OpenWebSearch.EU project, provided insights into the significance of the Open Web Index, which was developed in the project.

„Our mission is to break up the silo of a single search engine. (…) We’re doing this by crawling the web, collecting web pages, and preparing them to be consumed by search engines. Preparing them involves cleaning advertisements and navigation links, then extracting the main content. This index can be used by individuals or organisations to build their own search engines.“ states Michael.

While scaling up to compete with monopolies such as Google would require enormous resources, Michael believes that a community-oriented project could complement traditional and AI search as a public good. He envisions a future in which small AI models enable users to search for and combine information from various sources, independently of large technology companies.

In the future, societies will be shaped by humans and models working closely together

„In an ideal scenario, the AI model is running on my machine and controlling my data. It’s a tool that helps me, conducts searches on my behalf and understands what I want to do. I’m talking about small language models rather than large language models. A model that helps me search, aggregate and synthesise information based on search endpoints that I choose.“, he states

You can read the full interview here: https://en.reset.org/fighting-the-search-monopoly-with-an-open-source-index-an-interview-with-michael-granitzer-from-openwebsearch/

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