CSC promotes OpenWebSearch.EU project to replace Google in European market
2 min readCSC promotes OpenWebSearch.EU project to replace Google in European market
CSC promotes OpenWebSearch.EU project to replace Google in European market.
The CSC – IT Center for Science in Finland has recently collaborated with 13 other well-known European research centers to promote the OpenWebSearch.EU project to develop an open European infrastructure for web-based research.
The goal of the project is to advance digital sovereignty in Europe and foster an open, people-centred search engine marketplace.
The European Commission has just approved €8.5 million in financing for the Horizon Europe project.
The Finnish Scientific Computing Centre provides computing support and modeling, computing and information services to Finnish universities, research institutes and enterprises.
The centre is affiliated with the State of Finland and Finnish higher education institutions, managed by the country’s Ministry of Education and Culture, and operates on a non-profit basis.
Michael Granitzer said: “We were supposed to have free, open and fair access to information, but now web search has lost these fundamental principles and we desperately want to get it back. That’s why we will be based on European values and jurisdiction The right to create an open European infrastructure for Internet search”.
He is from the University of Passau and is currently the project coordinator of the Open Search Foundation, OpenWebSearch.EU.
Over the next three years, the researchers will develop the core of the European Open Web Index (OWI), which will serve as the basis for new Internet research in Europe.
In addition, the project will lay the foundation for an open and scalable European Web-based Search and Analysis Infrastructure (OWSAI) based on European values, principles, legislation and standards.
The Finnish Center for Scientific Computing will focus on three areas in the future: infrastructure for developing and storing open web indexes, natural language models and knowledge graphs, and an open web search ecosystem and sustainability.
Hanna-Mari Puuska, director of the center, said: “This will be a long-term commitment on our part, with great potential to offer new services, especially a web index built on Finnish and Swedish content”.
The OpenWebSearch.EU page says
The project stemmed from concerns about an imbalance in the search engine market. Although web search is the backbone of our digital economy, web search is still dominated and restricted by a handful of gatekeepers such as Google, Microsoft , Baidu or Yandex. Therefore, information as a public good can be obtained freely, fairly and transparently, and is no longer under the control of the public. This imbalance endangers democracy and limits the innovative potential of European research and the economy.
