EU Researchers Working to Bring Search Result Diversity to European Institutions

Using funding from the EU, a new research initiative is trying to bring better, localised and more diverse search results to Europe’s internet users. While tech giants like Google dominate the search engine sphere, the initiative hopes that news media, research institutions and other private entities can use this tool to optimise their operations.

Supporting Online Search

Today, using a search engine is an everyday occurrence for most people. They are used to conduct basic research, find products and source entertainment through the internet’s many websites.

With search engines, users can access a seemingly endless variety of content ranging from specialised blog articles to interactive iGaming platforms. In the latter case, users can find playable, fully-fledged digital simulations of card games or roulette online, like those seen at PeerGame. While these services are popular right now, it is widely predicted that digital activities like these will gain even more prominence in the future. This is because the technologies behind them will get even better, more immersive and more accessible to larger audiences.

As the digital landscape becomes more developed, search engines need to guarantee that their results serve user interest. This means news searches should be unbiased, curious searches should stay informative and activity searches should present a variety of options in e-commerce or iGaming results.

This is how Google functions, for the most part. However, localised and specialised searches can still make mistakes. This is something that Megi Sharikadze discovered when searching for a nearby post office. While Google search directed her to a far-away office, the local German post office site revealed an even closer branch. Sharikadze happened to be the research manager at Munich’s Leibniz Supercomputing Centre, home of the first German quantum computer made by IQM. Now, she has joined an initiative to create better localised search that’s built from the bottom up.

The OpenWebSearch.EU Initiative

That initiative now spans fourteen research institutions across the European Union, all working toward a tool called OpenWebSearch.EU. The project seeks to rebalance what they perceive as a one-sided system where non-EU search companies control mainstream search. This means that institutions across Europe spend time and money to redress inconsistencies and optimise for search engines that don’t have privileged knowledge of European regions.
Alongside Sharikadze and the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre, the University of Passau is also coordinating the project under data science professor Michael Granitzer. Describing the project’s goals, Granitzer said: “We want to empower communities so that they can easily filter and find those parts of the web that are relevant to them.”

OpenWebSearch.EU officially started in late 2022, while aiming for completion in summer of 2025. So far, the EU has contributed €8.5 million to the initiative. It differs from other European search engines in that it doesn’t scrape information from more popular engines, most operated outside of the EU. This tool is just the first step of a planned European Open Web Index (OWI) that has crawled 2.2 billion URLs and aims to provide diverse results in 185 different languages.

If successful, the initiative will result in a powerful, comprehensive database that houses a lot of European search data. From there, search engines across the world can tap into the OWI to provide Europe-specific results in greater detail, with more support for non-English languages, and all in compliance with the EU’s specific data protection legislation.

Photo by Lukas S on Unsplash

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