“Imagine, our streets would have no names and our houses no readable house numbers. Just a cryptic code readable only by machines.”
Dr. Stefan Voigt, Chairman of the OSF Board, explains the mission of the Open Search Foundation and the goal of the Open Web Index project in an interview for the Polish web blog HomoDigital.
He goes into more detail about the challenges and the great importance of the project in current political, social and technological context.
“So one of the main challenges is to inspire people and computing providers to cooperate on this large but socially extremely relevant task and to jointly make public information publicly accessible and usable again.”
Dr. Stefan Voigt is optimistic about a possible paradigm shift away from the current market concentration of large tech companies on the Internet.
The full interview is available on HomoDigital (in Polish) here.
The annual International Open Search Symposium #ossym will take place for the seventh time in a row in 2025. From 8 to 10 October, #ossym25 invites the open search community to travel to Helskinki/Finland to participate in the 3-day long interdisciplinary forum at this year’s event partner CSC – IT Center for Science or online.
Interdisciplinary perspectives on classic web search and AI
As every year, the #ossym brings together experts from a wide array of fields such as computer science, law & regulation, ethics, business, politics and society. The seventh International Open Search Symposium provides a forum for innovating ideas regarding open and distributed web search as well as its use cases. The focus will be on artificial intelligence (AI), search applications and technologies, legal and ethical aspects of open web search as well as topics relating to information exploitation/media literacy.
Keynotes on data governance and knowledge management
Viivi Lähteenoja is Chief Executuve Officer at MyData Company and gives impulses on the topic of data governance.
Harri Ketamo is founder and CEO of Headai and will speak on “The openness of knowledge data and its role in Future Search Solutions”.
Scientific sessions on the topic of “Architecture & Infrastructure”
Two science tracks on the topic of “Architecture & Infrastructure” will deal with the extraction of structured data from the Open Web Index, data storage structures for the URL Frontier in OpenWebSearch.eu, and the extraction of geodata from semi-structured data with the help of LLMs. Additionally, Common Crawl offers insights into the coverage of diverse European language and cultural content.
Application tracks on “Retrieval Augmented Generation & Large Language Models”
Decentralized approaches for accessing information via browser-agentic web as well as the fusion of retrieval, grammar and decision trees for text generation will be presented and discussed.
Search Engine Tracks remain an integral part of the #ossym conferences
A popular #ossym tradition are the Search Engine Tracks, which focus on alternative search engines and their areas of application. Already confirmed this year are fragFinn.de and searchmysite.net.
Ethics, law and society
Non-technical topics such as societal interests and special needs search solutions will round up the program and will provide exciting food for thought.
Information and Registration
The Finnish Supercomputing Center CSC – IT Center for Science offers around 100 on-site seats.
All information on registration and tickets can be found at:
https://opensearchfoundation.org/en/events-osf/ossym25/
The Open Search Foundation e. V. is a European movement that creates the basis for independent, free and self-determined access to information on the Internet. In cooperation with research institutions, data centers and other partners, we are committed to a web search that benefits everyone. True to the motto: “Together for a better net”.
Contact :
Open Search Foundation e.V. – OSF
With the vision to revolutionize web search on a European scale, the Open Search Foundation was one of the driving forces that kicked off the Open Web Search initiative in 2018.
Under this very initiative the eponymous OpenWebSearch.eu project was implemented in 2022 with 13 additional organizations from research and economy, all in all uniting forces across 7 European countries.
Now, only 2,5 years later, in 2025, the consortium proudly presents its common European federated Open Web Index pilot by the name of: OWI.
This achievement not only marks an important first cornerstone in European digital sovereignty, but it also comes at a critical time amidst urgent calls for action in the face of rapidly progressing global AI developments.
Innovators & early adopters wanted
From June onward, commercial and scientific development teams of any size as well as interested individuals are welcome to access and make use of almost a petabyte of open web data under a general research license or – upon request – under a designated commercial license as well.
This is an active call for early adopters to pioneer innovative projects surrounding vertical web search, argumentative search, LLM applications including RAG and more.
“The OWI symbolizes a first step towards true European digital sovereignty and is a fundamental step in paving the way for a comprehensive open European AI landscape.“
says OpenWebSearch.eu’s Community Manager Ursula Gmelch and she elaborates further:
“Our goal behind this initial pilot phase is to onboard a range of projects from diverse domains to get early feedback in. We look forward to users confirming the quality and value in current functionalities and/or helping us pivot in such ways that real market demands can be met and further expanded upon.“
Kick-off Event happens on 6 June
On 6 June from 10 am to 12 am CEST you can join the official kick-off event via Zoom.
Registration to the event is open under the following link:
https://cscfi.zoom.us/meeting/register/eATIpDQ5TZidh4Jzkim6FQ#/registration
Google’s decision to no longer explicitly rule out the use of its AI in weapons systems rightly raises questions about the value of voluntary commitments and principles made by companies.
The world is going crazy! This is the conclusion that observers of the latest political drumbeats are likely to come to. At the Munich Security Conference, it became clear that the anchors of stability of past decades, such as the transatlantic NATO alliance, could soon be a nostalgic thing of the past. The world is in a state of upheaval. And it is a small number of people who are using their power to shape social and political change. Google’s change in AI principles fits well into this picture: The company now allows its own artificial intelligence to be used for weapons systems. Such use was previously explicitly excluded. In today’s technocratic world, the heads of large digital tech giants are shaping the political discourse. Elon Musk, for example, has secured Donald Trump’s trust through money and skilful manoeuvring. On behalf of the US president, he is now turning the American executive branch upside down and making decisions at breakneck speed that have serious consequences for people all over the world, such as when Musk canceled the development aid from one day to the next. When authors talk about an ‘AI coup’, they are not being pessimistic.
Google’s decision to no longer explicitly exclude the use of its AI in weapons systems rightly raises the question of what voluntary promises and principles made by companies are actually worth. One thing is clear: Google is free to use its AI for the development and operation of weapons within the framework of the applicable laws. However, Google’s turnaround also makes it clear that companies are willing to throw ethical concerns overboard if they hope to reap economic benefits. Of course, this does not mean that ethical commitments by large corporations are purely a marketing measure. There are many companies that take their ethical and moral responsibility in the development of artificial intelligence seriously and set a good example. However, especially in the case of sensitive new technologies that will undoubtedly transform our society, compliance with minimum ethical standards should not be left to commercial players to decide for themselves. Instead, ethical standards must be ensured across all sectors and companies – through binding regulation. Whether the EU AI Regulation will prove to be a suitable means of achieving this remains to be seen.
The Musk case in the US already shows that if tech giants have too much power, no democratic system is safe from them. This applies not only to the USA, but also to Europe. The heavyweights of the digital world are already having a significant influence on legislative processes. Meta alone currently employs more than 40 lobbyists in Brussels. If Europeans want to prevent companies from ruthlessly pushing through their own interests, there is no way around more diversity in the digital space. In order to strengthen diversity and fairness in digital markets, European legislators have passed the Digital Markets Act (DMA). This regulatory offensive is an important building block, but is not enough on its own to protect Europe’s citizens, researchers and businesses from monopolists in the digital space. Rather, European solutions are needed that are fully available to business and science in order to keep Europe competitive and enable innovation.
In our new section ‘My opinion’, we provide comments and opinions from the Open Search Foundation team. Today, Leopold Beer – research fellow in the PriDI project – commented on Google’s decision to make its own AI applications available for weapons development in future.
The annual Digital Summit of the Federal Ministry for Digital and Transport took place in Frankfurt in October. Over the course of two days, round about 1,500 participants discussed the future of the digital space in panels, workshops and fishbowl formats. There were exciting impulses for politics, business, civil society and more.
As Open Search Foundation, we moderated a panel discussion on the topic of “Search engines, democracy and digital sovereignty: How AI and open data are changing internet search”. Our panelists Daphne Auer (Common Grounds), Martin Potthast (University of Kassel), Christian Kroll (Ecosia) and Armand Zorn (Member of the German Bundestag) were interviewed on current challenges regarding existing digital search infrastructures, potential developments and possible solutions.
Von l.n.r.: Stefan Voigt (OSF), Daphne Auer (Common Grounds Forum), Christian Kroll (Ecosia), Armand Zorn (Mitglied des Deutschen Bundestages)
Bias, dependencies and fundamental regulation
Daphne Auer kicked things off with an outline of the core problem in search, namely ‘bias’.
“When I search for something, I have a knowledge gap. I want to close it, preferably quickly. Most of us use the first one to three search results for this in everyday life. But how objective are these results? Why should the correct answer be represented in the first three results? What bias do the results have? Western bias? Commercial bias?” – with these words, the young computer scientist addressed the audience. As a concrete example that illustrates the meaning of pre-sorted results, she cited the ranking positions of human rights aspects in the course of the 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar. Delending on the country you were searching from, this topic appeared in different positions in the search engines. Her conclusion: results in search engines should be understood more as recommendation systems rather than comprehensive answers.
Martin Potthast focused on the importance of open data, which could provide more diversity and customized offers in the search market while serving as a basis for the development of European large language models. The prototype of an open web index – a kind of cataloging of web data – as is currently being developed in the OpenWebSearch.eu research project is the first step.
Christian Kroll brought Europe’s dependence on American digital giants to the fore. His case scenario: Should the USA decide to cut Europe off from the search indices of Google and Bing due to political changes, Europe would once again be dependent on libraries and telephone directories. The lack of digital sovereignty would have many effects on areas such as politics, the economy and civil society.
Armand Zorn emphasized the importance of regulations such as the Digital Markets Act and the Data Act currently in place in Europe. He considers smart regulation essential here. Basically, balancing the opportunities of new market models on the basis of minimum requirements should ensure objectivity and fairness in the search market. However, educating users is also fundamentally important and must begin in schools. Aware users would be better able to classify the sometimes opaque influences of information and use it in a targeted manner.
Personalization and diversity in line with standard requirements
Daphne Auer’s wish for the future of search includes personalized search results, looking beyond one’s own filters and the protection of personal data through anonymization. She expressed her hope for “more bridges, less polarization” through more visible diversity with regard to participation in digital dialogues as well as peer review-like verification approaches for content that reflects certain perspectives.
Martin Potthast also seemed to be invested in zooming out of the so-called filter bubbles. He addressed the problem of direct answers, which usually offer a quick but little differentiated solution to questions. Tools such as AI chatbots in particular will presumably make the filter flaps even narrower in the future, especially if there is no chat literacy. This means that those who don’t know how to ask the right questions will have a limited horizon with quick but poorly scrutinized results.
Finally, Armand Zorn addressed the fragmentation of society due to confirmation bias. Personalized search as an important part of everyday digital life, but without losing touch with reality. The danger is that people could create their own truths. In the future, it will be crucial to regulate in a way that a healthy balance between personal freedom and objective truth is maintained.
The discussion can be streamed via the YouTube channel of the Federal Ministry (start at time marker: 5.31 hours):
Open Search Foundation e.V.
The Open Search Foundation e.V. is a European movement of people and organisations that work together 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 a searching the web in a way that benefits everyone. The promotion of research in the field of search engines, plus education and cooperation, form the pillars of our work.
