“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.
https://opensearchfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/Bildschirmfoto-2025-07-17-um-11.16.40.png643719osf teamhttps://opensearchfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/18-12-open-search-foundation-logo-petrol.pngosf team2025-07-17 12:38:502025-07-17 12:38:50“Google is not democratic. It lives off the data of its users” | Interview for HomoDigital
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.
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”.
https://opensearchfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/OSSYM25-Registration-Open-Teaser_Li.jpg12501250OSF Teamhttps://opensearchfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/18-12-open-search-foundation-logo-petrol.pngOSF Team2025-07-11 15:14:102025-07-11 15:14:10Registration for the 7th Open Search Symposium #ossym25 is now open
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.“
https://opensearchfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/OWI-Launch_Event.png33753375OSF Teamhttps://opensearchfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/18-12-open-search-foundation-logo-petrol.pngOSF Team2025-05-23 12:02:152025-05-23 11:58:45After 2,5 years in the making: The Open Web Index OWI goes public in June
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.
https://opensearchfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/My-opion_ENG.png15611562osf Teamhttps://opensearchfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/18-12-open-search-foundation-logo-petrol.pngosf Team2025-03-12 10:29:192025-03-13 11:16:57The osf team comments: Leopold Beer on Google’s statement on using AI in weapons systems
https://opensearchfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/CDR.jpg481356osf Teamhttps://opensearchfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/18-12-open-search-foundation-logo-petrol.pngosf Team2025-02-05 16:45:212025-02-05 21:14:56OSF wins the Corporate Digital Responsibility Award in the category ‘Responsible Innovations’
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):
https://opensearchfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/osf-keyvisual-meeting-square.png600600OSF Teamhttps://opensearchfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/18-12-open-search-foundation-logo-petrol.pngOSF Team2024-12-05 09:21:242024-12-05 09:21:35The rocky road: our contribution to the German government’s digital summit 2024
https://opensearchfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/osf-keyvisual-videoconference-osf-red-square.png600600OSF Teamhttps://opensearchfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/18-12-open-search-foundation-logo-petrol.pngOSF Team2024-11-28 23:42:252024-12-16 19:26:59Update from the association: New, almost old board and a big thank you
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.
In the company of LRZ Deputy Director Helmut Reiser and OSF Chairman Stefan Voigt, Minister Herrmann was invited on a roundtour through the supercomputing rooms, a tour that on-site participants were offered as well as part of the afternoon activities.
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!”
From left to right: Dr. Stefan Voigt, Dr. Helmut Reiser, Dr. Florian Herrmann, Dr. Megi Sharikaze
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.
Richard Socher of you.com at Open Search Symposium 2024
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.
courtesy of LRZ/ Susanne Todorovic
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.
Noor Afshan Fathima (CERN) and OSF chair Christine Plote at the panel discussion “Exploring the ethical foundations of web search – perspectives and findings from research and practice”
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.
Rik Viergever from MURENA
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.