3 days, 120 participants, 4 Keynotes, 11 Sessions, 2 Workshops and one new Mascot! 😀

The 6th Open Search Symposium #ossym24 took place at the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre from 9 to 11 October. The annual event, organised by the Open Search Foundation, attracts experts and active members of the Open Search community as well as politicians, representatives of the digital economy and interested civilians.

This year’s discussions focused on technical topics such as “Crawling and Infrastructure”, “Search Applications and Technologies”, “Preprocessing and ML for Search”, “LLMs and RAG”, as well as ethical issues related to curation and transparency in community-driven content provision. Last but not least, macro-economic and legal aspects of Open Web Search were discussed and worked on intensively.

Day one kicked off with two back to back highlights

An opening speech by Bavarian Minister of State Dr. Florian Herrmann, followed by a keynote from Roberto Viola – Director General, Communications Networks, Content and Technology, European Commission, set the inspiring tone for day one of #ossym24.

Open Search Symposium back home in Bavaria

Addressing about 80 people in the room and another 40 plus online, Bavarian State Minister Dr. Florian Herrmann opened the symposium by sharing that “In Bavaria, we say that if something happens for the first time, it’s innovation; if it happens for the second time, it’s tradition”, referring to the fact that #ossym24 – after a couple of years in Geneva – has finally returned to Munich/Bavaria.

After warm words of welcome, Dr Herrmann told the audience about history of high tech research in Bavaria that has led and continues to lead to cutting-edge innovation in a wide range of industries. In view of the Open Search Initiative and the idea of promoting science and research through open and free internet search, Dr. Herrmann stated that “for science and research this is absolutely key”. He reiterated his personal belief in the initiative and confirmed the support of the Bavarian Prime Minister, Dr. Markus Söder, who in 2019 launched the so-called High Tech Agenda – a technology initiative that is unique in Europe and covers all the technologies relevant for the 21st century. In the course of this, the state of Bavaria is investing 5.5 billion euros with a particular focus on AI and information technologies.

He ended his speech with “a big thank you to all who are committed to open search with transparent and fair use of the Internet. Let’s fight for it now!”

8 billion Euros to build a supercomputing network

EU Commissioner Roberto Viola then gave a keynote speech with insights into the EU’s digital agenda for the coming years.

He began by introducing the original NGI (Next Generation Internet*) idea, which essentially aims to return the internet to an “open knowledge” culture rather than the commercially driven closed ecosystems that dominate the digital landscape today. With AI set to take over a large part of traditional web access in the near future, Viola sees many risks in the multiplication of biases along the chain of indexing, searching and training large language models. In particular, the often prevalent commercial bias creates a great need for alternatives.

Acknowledging the work of the Open Search Community, he said: “You have worked hard and especially in the field of web indexing and I am well aware that this community needs support and I will say that this support will be guaranteed from our side, but I hope – and the speech of the State Minister of Bavaria was reassuring me in this – that we have partners around Europe; public partners, but also my hope is that more companies wake up and become much more attentive to the risks of giving all of their assets to just one, two or three players”.

He noted that large companies have already moved into traditional media, disintegrating services. The next target, according to Viola, will be engineering, manufacturing through generative AI and other products – with some of the value shifting to the big players, which he explains as the reason for the continued growth of such companies on the stock markets. “…because the markets anticipate that they will intercept the EU from everywhere. We should not surrender and let our scientific industrial capabilities be this intermediated without us proposing an alternative,” he said.

Viola would like to see pharmaceutical companies, engineering companies, robotics companies and all companies that use AI extensively become more active in impressing these technologies. And he added: “In addition – from the public side – we have to do the maximum that we can to help out”.

Some steps have already been taken. Europe has invested 8 billion in building a supercomputing network that is now the largest in the world. He said, “we are very happy that on local levels like in Bavaria, there are initiatives which support the idea that we can have a world-class interconnected Supercomputing Grid and this is only the starting point.” With the recent launch of an initiative for AI factories, the idea is to co-locate start-ups, scientists and companies to connect them to the supercomputers and ensure that this open ecosystem for AI and search can actually be created.

Viola ended his speech with a reference to opening up markets for the benefit of all players. “The commercial web developed in a unique way. In absence of regulation. In every other sector, e.g. Aviation, Pharma, Banking, there are rules. All the most important activities by human beings are informed by rules.” The Digital Markets Act has provoked responses from large internet giants. Europe is being critiqued for over regulating and constraining innovation on the web. However, opening up markets has proven to be successful in other fields before. The European energy and telecommunications markets for example have benefited both providers and consumers. “The Digital Markets Act in particular is an asymmetric measure that is imposing so called gatekeepers to open up the services to competition – this is essential if we want the success of an initiative such as Open Search”.

The afternoon belonged to  “Next Generation Internet”

With this encouraging speech Viola sent participants off into the coffee break and on to a day filled with three science tracks, including an NGI – Next Generation Internet session with a project presentation of “NGI Search”. NGI Search is a project under the NGI umbrella that focuses on supporting entrepreneurs, tech-geeks, developers, and socially engaged people, who are capable of challenging the way we search and discover information and resources on the internet.

The session titled “Implications of an open web index for search, discovery, and indexing projects” was moderated by Mirko Presser. It’s goal was providing a “customer view of the Open Web Index (OWI), which is currently in the making by OpenWebSearch.eu – also a project under the NGI initiative. Projects funded by NGI Search presented their activities and acted as OWI customers/users, sparking a deeper dialogue on how the OWI can best meet potential market needs.

In the evening, on-site participants were invited to network and enjoy some Bavarian treats – provided by the OpenWebSearch.eu consortium as part of their community meet-up session. Read more here.

Day 2: More International voices take the stage

Alternative Search Engines provide AI solutions and specialised search results

The second conference day started with a keynote presentation from overseas by Richard Socher, former Chief Scientist at Salesforce and founder of you.com. He led the charge with a thought-provoking session on AI’s Jevons Paradox: “When AI gets cheaper, we don’t save costs—we just use more of it.” He also gave us a deep dive into you.com, an innovative chat-search assistant that’s taking search to the next level with “Executed Code Output” and verifiable sources.

A fun fact: you.com results outperformed ChatGPT in fact-checking. And a particular example did not disappoint: Prof. Dr. Christian Geminn challenged you.com with the following question: “What are the legal challenges of an open web index?” The on point answer: “It’s a complex puzzle involving data protection, intellectual property, and ethical web crawling. But with the right approach, an open web index can foster innovation while staying legally sound.”

According to #ossym tradition, two more alternative search engines were explored with Daoud Clarke from the UK-based, community-driven and curated search engine mwmbl.org and Simon Descarpentries from Meta-Press.es –a search engine, that will dig deep through the web and find media articles that other search engines do not pay attention to. Another highlight were the exciting parallel sessions with teams from the German Aerospace Centre and the University of Passau, offering real-world insights into the future of LLM-powered search.

 “Big Tech must go!”

In the afternoon, bestselling author and media scientist Dr. Martin Andree gave a lively keynote with the slogan “Big Tech must go! He not only presented his Atlas of the digital world, which tracks and records the overall distribution of online traffic.

Not much of a surprise to anyone: The world’s top 5 tech companies seem to run the internet more or less in isolation. Not only do these platforms have a disproportionate amount of traffic, but they also virtually eliminate competition through manoeuvres such as limiting outbound links, using self-preferencing traffic tactics when users leave a platform, and many more subtle manipulations.

Why is this a problem? These companies control global sales funnels…But what is also at stake is democracy: “I would say these corporations are non democracy compliant.” stated Andree.

Some of his proposed solutions: freedom for outlink design on platforms, open standards for platform interoperability, economic separation of transmission path and content, upper limit of 30% market share, ban on monetisation of criminal content.

These “5 Tips to Free the Internet” sparked some heated discussions. His new video talk “Big Tech must go” gets to the heart of the matter.

After a rejuvenating lunch break, the two afternoon workshops were dedicated to “Economic Topics” and “Legal Question-marks”. Both sessions brought out fiery debates that were continued well beyond #ossym24.

Day 3: discussions on ethical and societal issues and the governance of an Open Web Index

The final day of the conference came around in the blink of an eye and sparked new discussions around index governance as well as ethical and societal issues. A major highlight was the keynote speech by Nina Leseberg, Head of Communities & Engagement at Wikimedia Germany. In her talk “Digital Discourse: how the Wikipedia Community safeguards the quality of the digital encyclopedia” she shared insights into the complex issue of community-based content curation.

Updates and discussions from the OSF Working Group Ethics

The following panel on “Ethics + Society” was chaired by OSF chair Christine Plote. The panel also included Noor Afshan Fathima from CERN, Alexander Nussbaumer from the University of Graz and Renée Ridgway from Aarhus University/SHAPE Centre, Denmark, who shared the results of their ongoing OSF Ethics Working Group. Values, risk and opportunity assessments are at the heart of defining ethical guidelines for Open Web Search. The voluntary inclusion of “ethical labels” in applications based on the Open Web Index was just one interesting concept introduced by the panellists.

In the subsequent scientific session, chaired by Alexander Nussbaumer, Renée Ridgway, Rik Viergever from MURENA and Alex De Vries from Digiconomist presented their research on the environmental factors of AI in web search, the implications of an ethical smartphone in the context of data privacy and the values and ethics of an Open Search Infrastructure – from free software to open source.

Young scientists for fresh ideas

The conference ended with a refreshing contribution from the „Young Innovators“ student session. Daphne Auer (Common Grounds Forum) shared her concepts of “User-Driven Re-Ranking for an Adaption of the Variety in Search Results”; Felice Douglas and Susanne Krol shared creative “Curation Strategies for OpenWebSearch” including some gamification nuggets.

And, as a cool surprise, the #OpenSearchCommunity now has a new additional member: The “Weebie” mascot was created by Susanne Krol and handed over to project leader Stefan Voigt at the end of the session!

Together for a better net!

All in all, #ossym24 was filled with plenty of food for thought and exciting insights into manifold ongoing community projects, which all make a piece of the puzzle. Thank you to all contributors and guests! #ossym is nothing without its people!

The saying goes: After #ossym is before #ossym. So please save the date for #ossym25, which takes us up north to Helsinki, Finland from 8-10 October 2025.

 

*NGI – Next Generation Internet is a European initiative under the Horizon Europe programme. It features 39 funded research projects.