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. 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.
—Open Web Index
While there seems to be a multitude of search engines on the market, there are only a few relevant search engines in terms of them having their own index (the database of Web pages underlying a search engine). Other search engines pull results from one of these search engines (for example, Yahoo pulls results from Bing), and should therefore not be considered search engines in the true sense of the word. Globally, the major search engines with their own indexes are Google, Bing, Yandex, and Baidu. Other independent search engines may have their own indexes, but not to the extent that their size makes them competitive in the global search engine market.
I am proposing an idea for a missing part of the Web’s infrastructure, namely a searchable index [, the Open Web Index]. The idea is to separate the infrastructure part of the search engine (the index) from the services part, thereby allowing for a multitude of services, whether existing as search engines or otherwise, to be run on a shared infrastructure.
—CACM, “The Web Is Missing an Essential Part of Infrastructure: An Open Web Index“
Communications of the ACM, April 2019
By Dirk Lewandowski
“A proposal for building an index of the Web that separates the infrastructure part of the search engine—the index—from the services part that will form the basis for myriad search engines and other services utilizing Web data on top of a public infrastructure open to everyone.”
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