With a market share of over 90 percent, Google is regularly the number one search engine in Europe. Since 2004, “googling” has been officially listed as a verb in the dictionary and stands for searching or researching on the Internet with the application of the subsidiary of the US umbrella company Alphabet. As the gateway for a large number of Europeans and citizens worldwide, Google not only opens up information, but also helps determine their view of the Internet and the things depicted on it.

“If we’re honest, almost all of us only use one access to information,” Lower Saxony’s State Secretary for Digital Affairs, Stefan Muhle, points out. “And I am firmly convinced that this monopolization, this channeling, of only getting information in one way, is not good for science overall, nor for free democracy.” A “transparent and fair web search” is therefore necessary as the “European brand core in digitization”, emphasizes the CDU politician: “It’s time that we regain digital diversity and our digital sovereignty.”

Muhle therefore praises the European project Open Web Search, in which scientists have been working on the core of a European Open Web Index (OWI) for three years since September and thus want to lay the foundation for a new European web search. The aim of the program is to push back “the dominance of non-European Internet companies” such as Google and Microsoft, explains the Suma association for free access to knowledge. He is a partner with the meta search engine MetaGer alongside the Open Search Foundation (OSF), the German Aerospace Center (DLR), the CERN research institute near Geneva and a dozen universities from Germany, the Netherlands, the Czech Republic, Slovenia and Finland are involved in the project.

Previously, there had been a first German project for an OWI since 2014, which emanated from the Hamburg University of Applied Sciences and the information department there. The Suma picked up on this project early on, so that it plays a role in the content of the new attempt. Dirk Lewandowski, Professor for Information Research and Retrieval at the educational institution in the Hanseatic city, pointed out almost ten years agoit is high time to finally create a freely accessible search engine index and the open infrastructure required for it.

The EU Commission is funding the new initiative for an open European substructure for web searches with 8.5 million euros via the Horizon Europe research framework program. According to project coordinator Michael Granitzer from the University of Passau and the OSF, free, open and unbiased access to information is the basic principle for searching the web. This was lost due to Google’s market dominance.

The researchers want to put a stop to this and build the basic framework for a search that focuses on European values ​​and rules. These include, for example, the transparency and comprehensibility of the algorithms used, the protection of privacy and user access to their own data. Users should be able to decide for themselves whether information such as their location or their interests is included.

According to experts, the program routines currently used by large search providers sometimes distort perceptions and ultimately also influence the formation of public opinion. “As a private company, Google could always design search results according to its own ideas,” warns Christian Gütl from the Cognitive and Digital Science Lab at Graz University of Technology, which is involved in the project. The operator is already doing that, but this could be much more massive. In general, if websites “drop out of Google’s search index for political or financial reasons, then they can no longer be found”.

Even as a data octopus, the leading search provider is becoming more and more dangerous, knows Christine Plote from the OSF board. Many researched on the Internet on very personal topics such as illnesses. Profiles created on the basis of this search history opened the door to intentional or unconscious manipulation and abuse.

While Google keeps its search algorithm secret and guards it like the apple of its eye, the OWI is said to be open source. “With source code that can be viewed publicly, I can find out exactly what the search engine stores about me and, above all, check it,” says Wolfgang Sander-Beuermann from Suma, presenting a major advantage associated with this. In addition to the search terms, parameters such as IP Addresses, screen ciphers as well as fonts and font sizes that made at least one PC or smartphone clearly identifiable via a digital footprint.

The second decisive factor is decentralization. In order to set up the OWI, the available computing power of participating institutions should first be bundled and the index itself distributed. Above all, the Leibniz data center in Garching near Munich, which is considered one of the largest in the scientific field in Europe, the IT4 of the TU Ostrava in the Czech Republic and probably CERN, where Tim Berners-Lee invented the web, are still planned by to catalog the first parts of the Internet for the index this quarter or to get infrastructure projects to be crawled in a decentralized manner. The first attempts were made in Passau.


What is missing: In the fast-paced world of technology, there is often time to re-sort all the news and background information. At the weekend we want to take it, follow the side paths away from the current, try different perspectives and make nuances audible.

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