Perspektiven eines Open Web Index

Abstract

The European search engine market has been dominated by one single search engine, namely Google, for many years. Most commentators agree that this situation is undesirable, and a discussion has started on ways to solve this problem. This article discusses different approaches, and then focuses onthe idea of building an OpenWebIndex (OWI). This index should be provided in the form of a public infrastructure. The core idea here is to unlink the data underlying a search engine (the index) and the (search) services themselves. Many such services could be built on the basis of one index. Therefore, anOpenWebIndex would provide the basis for diversityon the search engine market.