I’m As users’ complaints about the declining quality of Google search are getting worse, especially after the integration of generative AI, the effect is even more worrying. European organizations are working to open up alternatives. One of the key plans is to build an Open Web Index to support the development of new search engines and reduce dependence on Google and Bing.
The early trial of open web page index will be launched next month. This ongoing project is expected to help European countries get rid of their over-reliance on advertising-driven search engines. As U.S. technology giants increasingly tend to optimize search services around generative AI and advertising, the OpenWebSearch.eu initiative aims to promote the development of non-profit alternatives.
It should be emphasized that Open Web Index itself is not a search engine. Its function is more like a digital library, from which search engines can extract web pages and files. At present, major search engines rely on proprietary indexing systems, while smaller search engines often rely on them. The Open Web project pointed out that this centralized structure allows Google and other companies to have too much control over the global network.
The regulators of the United Kingdom and the European Union have been opposing the monopoly of American technology giants (such as Apple, Google, etc.), especially in key areas such as search and artificial intelligence.
At the same time, global users generally feedback that the quality of search results is continuing to decline. Many website operators also complain that Google is “closing” its ecosystem and restricting users from jumping out of their platform. And the generative AI tool also frequently has the problem of inaccurate information. Some organizations believe that the development of European-based search engines and AI models will be one of the key ways to solve this problem.
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In order to achieve the above goals, an alliance of 14 member institutions – including many universities, data centers, technology companies and the European Centre for Nuclear Research (CERN) – will fund and build an infrastructure for open web indexing.
The project not only serves the research and development of search engines, but also provides support for small and medium-sized enterprises to build “big language models (LLM)” or other non-advertising-driven applications, so as to eliminate dependence on Google and Bing.
The project also hopes to promote the development of applications that comply with European regulations, values and culture. For example, EU-based search engines and language models will theoretically be able to process non-English language information more accurately. At the same time, the alliance is also deeply studying how web crawling and how click behavior affects the ranking mechanism.
The first public trial will be launched on June 6 (10:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. Central European Daylight Time) through the Zoom online conference. Participants will be able to access about 1PB (bytes, 1PB=1024TB==2^ 50 bytes) of the web page content. The final version of Open Web Index is expected to host about 5PB of content and plan to expand to 10PB in the future.
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