mastodon 4.7.3Promoting Europe’s Independence in Web Search.
14 renowned European research and computing centers have joined forces to develop an open European infrastructure for web search. The initiative will be contributing to Europe’s digital sovereignty as well as promoting an open human-centered search engine market.
🤗 Today is the day! We have exciting news to share!
Curlie.org with the support of OpenWebSearch.eu generously offers the entire Curlie web directory for download – for free!
🐿️ As of today you can get your hands on the largest human-edited web directory currently out there.
A special thanks goes to our project partner Leibniz Supercomputing Centre for hosting the download.
👉 Waste no more time! Get started right here: https://curlie.org/download
Results from Third-Party Partner Project #NordLink are here
Universities operate enormous HPC resources - thousands of nodes, petabytes of storage, high-end GPUs. Most of it is used for scientific research. Could it also serve an open web search infrastructure?
The University of Oldenburg connected its data centre & HPC cluster to the OWS network.
👉 50 TB S3 storage, dedicated servers, + an HPC cluster w/ 20,000+ CPU cores, 145 TB RAM, and 36 NVIDIA A100/H100 GPUs
Results from Third-Party Partner Project #EEI are here
Where does a European open web search infrastructure physically run? If the answer is exclusively on non-European cloud providers, the sovereignty the project aims to foster is undermined.
👉 The EEI team provided GPU-accelerated bare-metal servers in its French data centres for the OWS.EU project. The infrastructure is managed directly by in-house teams, w/o subcontractors under European regulatory frameworks.
ARTE.tv featured our project in a recent documentary on European digital dependencies:
https://openwebsearch.eu/wo-bleibt-das-europaische-google-oder-facebook-arte-tv/
🥳 A big shoutout goes to @djoerd@idf.social from our team at @Radboud_uni@mastodon.social whom you can see in the interview!
University Passau, @Radboud_uni@mastodon.social, CERN, German Aerospace Center, Leipzig University, Technische Universität Graz, IT4Innovations National Supercomputing Center, CSC-IT Center for Science, A1 Slovenija d.d., Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, @osf@suma-ev.social, @LRZ_DE@mastodon.social , SUMA-EV, @nlnet@social.nlnet.nl
Results from our Third-Party Partner project #OMMS are published!
What was it about?
Open a proprietary maps app, search for a restaurant, and you see opening hours, phone number, FAQ and photos.
Open an OpenStreetMap-based app and you see a name and a pin.
The gap is not in the map data – it's in the business information layer.
The project addressed this issue, using the #OWI to harvest structured data from websites linked to OpenStreetMap points of interest.
"...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 & understands what I want to do. I’m talking about small language models rather than large language models..." – @grani@suma-ev.social in an interview w/ RESET - Digital for Good
Read more on:
📍 the state of the European #OWI
📍 benefits of a community driven solution
📍 recommendations from Michael on which search engines to try
📢 Yesterday was European Data Protection Day 2026. 👉️ It's time to take action!
Using the internet has become expensive. It costs us most of our privacy – because data is the currency of the internet. Take action and switch – there are alternatives that respect your privacy. 💡You can find some good tips for switching here: https://di.day/.
Our series ‘(R)echt bekannt!?’ (in German) explains your rights when it comes to data protection: 📌 https://pridi-projekt.de/#wissen
Results from our Third-Party Partner project#DTCommerce are here! 🙌
For a small retailer setting up an online store with hundreds of products can feel daunting. The DTCommerce project by ZenLab built open-source tools to automate the process: upload an Excel export from your accounting software, and the system sets up WooCommerce products, then automatically enriches them with descriptions, imagery, and metadata extracted from supplier websites.
Read the whole story:
https://openwebsearch.eu/ditcommerce-results/
Results from our Third-Party Partner project #FUN are here!
How should the web be crawled in the age of natural language search and AI? Traditional crawlers use PageRank: well-linked pages are assumed to be important. But popularity and semantic quality are not the same thing.
The FUN project team proposes neural crawling – using language models to estimate the semantic quality of web pages and prioritize accordingly.
Results from Third-Party Partner project #CIFFIL are here!
Picture this: A small municipality with no more than 10 k documents in its search index suffers from poor search quality. Collections of that size are not big enough to produce reliable term statistics for ranking criteria.
The project team let smaller municipalities borrow index statistics from larger ones. Using CIFF, they built tools for sharing term statistics between municipal search platforms.
Still stoked about our recent trip to Osaka/Japan for #SCA/HPC Asia 🇯🇵
The OWS team got to present research and results in poster sessions as well as in one on one talks at the booth plus in a showcase presentation on federated HPC Workflows for Large-Scale Web Indexing, presented by Michael Granitzer from University of Passau and Martin Golasowski from IT4Innovations National Supercomputing Center.
Arigato to all who came by!
📣 Call for papers & participation
One month left to hand in your works for the 3rd international Workshop on Open Web Search #wows2026
📍Happening from 29 March-2 April 2026 as a side event of ECIR2026.
👉 The workshop aims to promote & discuss ideas + approaches to open up the web search ecosystem so that small research groups + young startups can leverage the web to foster an open & diverse search market.
All details:
https://opensearchfoundation.org/events-osf/wows2026/
Join our #CommunityMeetUp on 13 April
The OpenWebSearch.EU project has officially ended, but the community stays & the journey continues!
Join our new #OpenWebSearch Community Meet-up format!
Combining the former Community Update & the Tech & Applications roundtables, we will meet every first Monday of the month. Get the latest on #OWS + share what you're working on!
The April Community Meet-up happens 13 April, 15:00-16:00 CEST, via Big Blue Button
Sign-up now: community@openwebsearch.eu
Results from our Third-Party Partner project #TILDE are here!
Search for health information online and the results will be ranked by relevance. Are they trustworthy? Do they represent diverse viewpoints?
The TILDE team built a health search system on the #OWI that goes beyond relevance. It extracts medical entities from 200,000 health-related web pages, normalises them to clinical ontologies, and implements a hybrid search engine.
Results from our Third-Party Partner project
#VERITAS are in!
Can open web data power real-time fact-checking?
The VERITAS team built a retrieval-augmented generation chatbot and Chrome extension for verifying claims online.
The idea: instead of prompting an AI model to generate answers from whatever it absorbed during training, you first retrieve relevant documents from a trusted knowledge base and then ask the model to compose its answer based on those documents.
Results from our Third-Party Partner project #AKASE are in!
What if a search engine could assess the quality of arguments?
The AKASE project team built an Argumentation Knowledge Graph based on 105 million web documents that were pulled from the #OpenWebIndex. The Knowledge Graph maps how arguments across the web support, attack, and rephrase each other.
The system identifies claims and premises, detects logical fallacies, and assesses argument quality automatically.
https://openwebsearch.eu/akase-results/
Our OpenWebSearch.eu partner portrait series continues.
Read our short interview with @phoefer@suma-ev.social from SUMA-EV on our blog 🙌 👇
https://openwebsearch.eu/ows-eu-partner-in-focus-suma-ev/
We are working on our last newsletter issue of the year. If you haven't signed up to our mailings yet, now is a good time to do so:
https://openwebsearch.eu/newsletter/
📝 The Open Web Search Partner interview series continues...
Our 14 Partners are sharing their project insights one week at a time.
On the blog now is a recent interview with the team from Technische Universität Graz. Take a look here:
https://openwebsearch.eu/ows-eu-partner-in-focus-the-graz-university-of-technology/
#openwebsearch #partnerseries #tugraz
Japan, here we come! 🇯🇵
Meet the OpenWebSearch.eu team at #SCA/HPCAsia 2026 in Osaka from 26-29 January. Come visit us at our booth at stand S11 in the exhibition hall (third floor) and talk to our experts.
We look forward to seeing you soon! 🙌
🗣️ Call for Papers is extended for #ossym2026
#EBDVF kicks off next week!
Our team hosts the session "Reclaim the Web! Towards sovereign AI, Analytics and Search Services in Europe" on 13 Nov, 12.00-13.00 CET.
The European #OpenWebIndex can support research & business applications.
- Learn about the need for such a public Web data infrastructure
- We will present #OWI use cases
- A strategic outlook on further usage possibilities, incl. future governance model structure & a financial model for the Open Search ecosystem will be given
🎈 Save the Date for #EuropeanBigDataValueForum, 12-14 Nov in Kopenhagen
European Big Data Value Forum brings the European data-driven AI research + innovation community together to share knowledge, collaborate & celebrate achievements.
Among the speakers from our team:
🗣️ Stephan Hachinger from @LRZ_DE
🗣️ 🗣️ Jan Martinovič and Katerina Slaninova from IT4Innovations National Supercomputing Center
🗣️ Stefan Voigt from @osf@suma-ev.social 🗣️
Per Öster from CSC - IT Center for Science
☕ Swing by our booth ;)
📌 Pre-Announcement: OWS.EU to launch 2 Third-Party #OpenCalls in February
After the successful onboarding of 6 Third-Party Partners last November, OWS.EU will call for proposals again:
📣Calls #2 & #3 invite researchers, innovators + data centres to submit their applications to participate in the #OpenWebSearch mission & receive project fundings.
https://openwebsearch.eu/pre-announcement-third-party-calls
Stay up to date on OWS.EU developments via our monthly community update calls:
https://openwebsearch.eu/community/owseu-community-updates
👋Meet OWS.EU Third-Party Partner #LAW4OSAI
📍Enabling license-aware crawling of web content by automatically identifying and retrieving content licenses. We welcome Daniel Braun, Bernhard Waltl & Balthasar Cevc onboard.
⬇️ Read more: https://openwebsearch.eu/partners/owseu-project-law4osai/
👋 Meet OWS.EU Third-Party Partner Open Console
„An alternative to Google’s Search Console is a module in the Open Console web-interface. You prove your identity + site ownership and all Search Engines can get the same configuration you entered.”
📍 Regulating copyrights, licenses, & abuse management needs consent between data collectors & providers.
➡ Participants in Open Console improve the quality of inputs.
📍 By Mark Overmeer + Thao Phuong Nguyen.
https://openwebsearch.eu/partners/owseu-project-open-console/
#OpenWebSearch
🏁 Common Goals with #CommonCrawl!
We are listed as one of the official partners of Common Crawl:
https://commoncrawl.org/collaborators
“Common Crawl is not only a major resource for web-innovations, but also an inspiring partner. We are particularly looking forward to co-operate on license-aware crawling and to integrate their crawls into our open web index,“ says Michael Granitzer, ows.eu’s principal investigator.
Common Crawl Foundation is an NGO that crawls the web & provides its archives & datasets.
Assessing the „Market Potential“ of an #OpenWebIndex
👋 Meet OWS.EU Third-party partner Mücke Roth & Company
📍The Mücke Roth & Company team surrounding Daniel Nowakowski brings their management consulting expertise into OWS.EU to evaluate economic & non-economic aspects, including societal, cultural and environmental dimensions.
📍Mücke Roth & Company is a management consultancy in the heart of Munich.
➡️ More: https://lnkd.in/dj_9wEsZ
⏳ 🛎 Hurry up, for time is running short! Only two weeks left to apply for the OWS.EU #OpenCalls, which close on 4 April!
🗣 The OWS.EU Open Calls 2 and 3 address innovators and/or researchers as well as data/computing centres.
Successful applicants are granted fundings of up to 150,000 Euros for a period of 12 months time.
Have a look at the details & requirements:
📣 Call2:https://openwebsearch.eu/community/3rdparty-calls/call2/
📣 Call 3: https://openwebsearch.eu/community/3rdparty-calls/call3/
⏳ Deadline: 4 April, 17:00 CET
🚢 6 Third Parties successfully onboarded! 🥳
In October we welcomed 6 Third Parties with distinct Legal, Technical & Economical expertise to the project.
🔎 We will soon look into all parties one by one.
Meanwhile read about the Call's objective + eligibility criteria.
⬇️ https://openwebsearch.eu/third-parties-onboading/
Let‘s get legal - pt 2
👋 Meet OWS.EU Third-Party Partner LOREN
LOREN will provide insights into the legal implications of crawling & data storage + sharing. There will be recommendations for building & operating an #OpenWebIndex that complies with the European laws & regulations.
Paul C. Johannes is an experienced attorney at law with a focus on IT law.
Dr. Maxi Nebel is a legal practicioner & managing partner at DRBG + author of numerous publications.
https://openwebsearch.eu/partners/owseu-project-loren/
@osf@suma-ev.social @EC_NGI@social.network.europa.eu
Let´s get legal once more!
👋 Meet OWS.EU Third-Party Partner LISA
📍The project´s objective is to help deliver tangible guidelines for OWS.EU from a legal, social & security viewpoint. The project tackles questions such as ownership of digital content, sharing the index + governance structures.
📍Prof. Dr. Matthias Wendland, LL.M. (Harvard) is Professor of Information Technology Law at the University of Oldenburg + Head of the Digital Law Hub at the University of Graz.
Let‘s get legal!
👋 Meet OWS.EU Third-Party Partner ALMASTIC
Led on by Prof. Dr. Kai Erenli LL.M, the project aims to legally secure the #OpenWebIndex by subjecting its technical aspects – collection, storage, distribution (and use by end-users) – to legal evaluation.
📍 Prof. Dr. Kai Erenli is Study Director of the Bachelor Programs „Interactive Media & Games Business“ at the University of Applied Sciences BFI Vienna.
https://openwebsearch.eu/partners/owseu-project-almastic/
#OpenWebSearch
@osf@suma-ev.social @EC_NGI@social.network.europa.eu
