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Diskutieren Sie Ideen und Ansätze eines offenen Web-Such-Ökosystems!
Topics:
Crawling
Search engine deployment
Search engine evaluation
Use of the web as a resource
Open-source prototypes
Cooperative action
The Third International Workshop on Open Web Search (WOWS) aims to promote and discuss ideas and approaches to open up the web search ecosystem so that small research groups and young startups can leverage the web to foster an open and diverse search market.
Therefore, the workshop, which takes place at ECIR2026, has two calls that support collaborative and open web search engines: (1) for scientific contributions, and (2) for participation in the WOWS-Eval shared task for collaborative evaluations of the Open Web Index.
The first call aims for scientific contributions to building collaborative search engines, including collaborative crawling, collaborative search engine deployment, collaborative search engine evaluation, and collaborative use of the web as a resource for researchers and innovators.
The second call on the WOWS-Eval shared task aims at gaining practical experience with joint, cooperative evaluation of search engines by focusing on using the Open Web Index (OWI) for (RAG) retrieval experiments.
Programme 2 April 2026
9:00 — 9:15
Welcome and coffee
9:15 — 10:15
Keynote
Reproducibility in the Era of Agents
Jimmy Lin (University of Waterloo)
10:15 — 10:30
Discussion
10:30 — 11:00
Coffee break
11:00 — 11:25
User Perspectives on Retrieval-Augmented Generation Features in MosaicRAG
Sebastian Gürtl, Felix Holz and Alexander Nussbaumer (Graz University of Technology)
11:25 — 11:50
Socio-Archival Web Search: Transparent Web Archival Search to Empower Social Science Research
Muhammad Taimoor Khan, Dimitar Dimitrov, Johannes Kiesel and Stefan Dietze (GESIS – Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences)
11:50 — 12:15
A Metadata-Centric Approach Towards Better Reproducibility in IR
Maik Fröbe, Tim Hagen and Martin Potthast (Friedrich-Schiller University Jena and University of Kassel)
12:15 — 12:30
Discussion
12:30 — 13:30
Lunch
The Calls for participation are open!
Call 1: Call for papers #wows2026
We seek research contributions that address elements of a traditional web search pipeline and also incorporate recent developments such as (open source) large language models to interface with retrieval systems. Specifically, our focus is on contributions that address the importance of an open web search pipeline and the creation of an open web index as a basis for the development of search applications for specific purposes and communities. We are particularly interested in contribution along the pipeline for creating an open web index, i.e. crawling, preprocessing, enrichment and indexing, as well as on serving (parts of) an open web index for advancing information retrieval. The latter also includes new search paradigms or ethical, legal and social aspects related to open web search. Topics include:
- Crawling for an Open Web Index, Collaborative crawling
- Web deployment of search engines
- Standards for search and Interoperability
- Large scale web data pre-processing components or pipelines
- Pre-processing and Enrichment
- Indexing and Search Architectures
- Open infrastructures for evaluation
- Open source search engines
- Open source replicability
- Ethical and legal aspects of web search
- Alternatives for query logs and click logs
- Vertical search engines
- Search engines for low-resource languages
- Energy efficiency of web search
- Standardisation and methods for index exchange and tokenisation
Submissions to WOWS should be 5 to 12 pages. Reviewing will be single-blind. Please, use the single-column CEUR-WS format available at http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-XXX/CEURART.zip
EXTENSION: Deadline for submissions is 12 March 2026.
Call 2: Call for participation in WOWS-Eval
Evaluation plays a critical role for any (web) search engine. It is essential to guide the development efforts of collaborative open web search engines, especially when multiple different organizations with different goals contribute different components of the ecosystem. For wows-eval, we created an evaluation resource for the Open Web Index, that comes with topics created by humans and relevance judgments created by humans as well as alternative relevance judgments created by large language model relevance assessors. We call for submissions of retrieval systems to analyze the Open Web Index and to decide which retrieval models might be helpful for which retrieval task. The dataset is available in ir_datasets (details for the access are available in the OWI Dashboard.
We invite both run submissions and software submissions as Docker images to TIRA/TIREx.
Deadline for submissions is 18 March 2026.
Any questions or feedback?
Please do not hesitate to contact us via our forum on TIRA.