Open Web Index

The main Idea of Open Web Index is to set up a publicly funded, global, searchable index of the Web that is open to competing companies, institutions and civil society actors. The Open Web Index is a European-based approach for a competitive and data-protecting digital infrastructure. It aims to build a basis for genuine competition in the digital platform business.

Structure for separating index and services

Separating the index and the servicesallows for a multitude of services, whether existing as search engines or otherwise, to be run on a shared infrastructure. The figure shows how the public infrastructure is responsible for crawling the web, for indexing its content, and for providing an interface and application programming interface (API) to the services that are built upon the index. While services are allowed to do their own further indexing to prepare documents, some advanced indexing is also provided by the open infrastructure. Furthermore, as modern search engines rely heavily on usage data, these data (most prominently search queries routed to the index) are collected and made available for reuse.

Some possible applications

A web index puts unstructured and heterogeneous data of the Internet into a structured shape. This enables setting up Internet services, which process this data for different kinds of usage.