- cross-posted to:
- technology@midwest.social
- cross-posted to:
- technology@midwest.social
After 2,5 years of intensive research and programming efforts, the entire Openwebsearch.eu project team is excited to grant access to its pilot of the first-ever federated pan-European Open Web Index (OWI).
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 (and growing) of open web data under a general research license or – upon request – under a designated commercial license as well.
Given that the European Commission has launched the InvestAI initiative to mobilize €200 billion of investment in artificial intelligence, the Open Web Index comes with perfect timing.
The OpenWebSearch.eu consortium actively calls 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 Community Manager Ursula Gmelch and 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.“
An official kick-off event will be hosted on 6 June from 10 am to 12 am CEST via Zoom.
Registration to the event is open under the following link:
https://cscfi.zoom.us/meeting/register/eATIpDQ5TZidh4Jzkim6FQ#/registration
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Is thus like google search but better and European or am i misreading?
In an nutshell, this is what I understand, too. It may take some time until it gets fully competitive but it could soon get a better alternative to the gatekeepers like Google imho.
Addition for a brief article I just found:
The EU’s Open Web Index Project: Another Step Toward Digital Independence
The Open Web Index (OWI) is an open-source initiative under the European Union’s Horizon Programme, aimed at democratizing web-search technologies and strengthening Europe’s digital sovereignty. The project will launch in June 2025, providing a common web index accessible to all and decoupling the indexing infrastructure from the search services that use it. In doing so, the OWI offers not only technical innovations but also a paradigm shift in the global search market—today, a single player (Google) holds over ninety percent of the market share and determines access to online information.
The project’s core idea is to make web crawling, metadata enrichment, and indexing a shared European resource. Development takes place in large data centres that process terabytes of raw data each day and publish the entire index as open data. All software components are open-source, and the CIFF format ensures that systems based on Lucene, Solr, or Terrier can connect to the OWI seamlessly. Thus, with minimal effort, researchers and developers can create vertical search engines that rank results according to specific criteria such as sustainability or privacy priorities […]
Hm sounds more like just a web scrape to me. I.e. someone else will need to build a search engine on top of this.
It’s an index, not a web scrape, though if you want to think about it that way then go for it. Indexes back all search engines.
Fingers crossed
Given that the European Commission has launched the InvestAI initiative to mobilize €200 billion of investment in artificial intelligence, the Open Web Index comes with perfect timing.
But these dumbfucks cutted the awesome NGI Zero Grant for this. Which funded many awesome Open Source Projects
