EU Open Web Search project kicked off

Re:EU Open Web Search project kicked off by jacooper on Tuesday September 20, 2022 @01:59PM (#32915441)

> A new EU project OpenWebSearch.eu … [in which] … the key idea is to separate index construction from the search engines themselves, where the most expensive step to create index shards can be carried out on large clusters while the search engine itself can be operated locally. …[including] an Open-Web-Search Engine Hub, [where anyone can] share their specifications of search engines and pre-computed, regularly updated search indices. … that would enable a new future of human-centric search without privacy concerns.

So.. Who's going to create the index? Indexing the web is expensive, and its offset by the ads the indexer runs on their search website, such as Google, bing, brave and others.

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Re:EU Open Web Search project kicked off by arvonle on Tuesday September 20, 2022 @11:08PM (#32920423)

Well easy, Europeans are going to fund it with their taxes, public search labs are going to build it, private companies squeeze the concept for cash for as long as possible while taking EU taxpayer money as "research grants" and claiming operational costs as "research tax credits" which will set them up as special parners for the next EU cashgrab (I mean quadriannual plan) since they have successfully run a public-private partnership (into the ground)

t. was involved in one of those plans as part of the research team in a public lab

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Re:EU Open Web Search project kicked off by amelius on Tuesday September 20, 2022 @02:46PM (#32916119)

I wonder how privacy will be ensured when your query hits the map-reduce infrastructure running on these clusters.

Regarding privacy the bar is significantly higher than what Google has to deal with. This will come at some cost in quality and/or speed.

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Re:EU Open Web Search project kicked off by caust1c on Tuesday September 20, 2022 @03:08PM (#32916400)

Every individual website has an incentive to create indices of their own content, and hosting providers could provide it as a service. Not hard to envision. Search Engines could download these indices periodically to build the meta-search.

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Re:EU Open Web Search project kicked off by wizofaus on Tuesday September 20, 2022 @03:11PM (#32916442)

Also not hard to envision websites being incentivised to lie in their indexes.

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Re:EU Open Web Search project kicked off by caust1c on Wednesday September 21, 2022 @03:18AM (#32921747)

Lie how? Meta indexes can be picky about the sites they list, simple as that. One could imagine personal meta search engines which only list the sites you care about. Bad sites simply don't get listed.

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Re:EU Open Web Search project kicked off by wizofaus on Wednesday September 21, 2022 @03:20PM (#32930109)

The point is that if a popular search engine returned pages primarily based on whether particular search terms appeared in their self-published indexes (rather than using a crawler that parsed the page content to build its own index), web sites could easily publish indexes that just listed popular terms users are known to search for regardless of whether the site had anything to do with those search terms. Pretty much what uses to happen 10-15 years ago when everyone believed meta tags were the way to achieve SEO.

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Re:EU Open Web Search project kicked off by moffkalast on Tuesday September 20, 2022 @02:13PM (#32915665)

Someone who's snagging an EU grant, that's who.

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Re:EU Open Web Search project kicked off by ur-whale on Tuesday September 20, 2022 @04:10PM (#32917125)

> Someone who's snagging an EU grant, that's who.

Bullseye.

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