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/