Bookmark: Open Web Search Project | Openwebsearch.eu
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.
I’ve been wondering why Europe has not launched their own web search engine over the last decade or more, instead being content to rely on American Big Tech (ie. Google and Bing) and Russian (Yandex) for search. It seems they finally got the message and launched Open Web Search which is a crawler building a OWS search index which is currently at 1.6 billion web pages. (For comparison UK based Mojeek’s unique search index is at 8.2 billion pages.)
It’s interesting that the 3 largest domains crawled are blog hosts Blogspot, WordPress.com and the massive wiki at Wikipedia. It’s a good sign that, at least to start, OWS isn’t that interested in commercial web pages.
It’s not clear what the long term plans are for OWS, 1. will they start their own search engine or 2. will they make their index available to commercial meta search engines? Right now they seem to be focused on crawling and building their index and rightly so. Anyway, Open Web Search is an interesting project and worth keeping an eye on.
Discovered when I noticed their crawler (OWLer) crawling my directory listings.
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