The Open Search Foundation e.V. is a European non-profit initiative dedicated to enabling independent, transparent, and democratic access to online information. Working in collaboration with research institutions, data centres, and other partners, the foundation promotes open web search as a public good. Its core activities include advancing search engine research, fostering cooperation, and supporting education in the field.

**Dr. Stefan Voigt **is Chairman and CEO of the Open Search Foundation e.V. and Coordinator of the OpenSearch@DLR project. Together with his team (Ursula Gmelch, Community Manager and Katrin Wellenberg, Science Communications Manager), he leads efforts to develop open infrastructures, such as the Open Web Index. These initiatives aim to promote innovation, support European digital sovereignty, and advance ethical and reliable search systems and AI applications.

*** Please describe your organization’s tasks in the project. What is your field of expertise that you bring to the project?***

Stefan: The Open Search Foundation has a networking, communication, and coordination role. We coordinate the work package on dissemination, exploitation, and communication (DEC), as well as the community building and outreach tasks. All in all, we network across different disciplines and bring the community together.

How is the project progressing? Which major milestones did you achieve?

**Stefan: **We think that the Open Web Search Project is processing very well. All the major technical and organizational goals and milestones were met. Together with our partners, we managed to bring together a large community of supporters and contributors, including computing centers, SMEs, and other organizations that use the Web Index and support the building and growing of the use of web data. The major milestone was the launch of the pilot Web index that the technical partners contributed to a lot. At the same time, we managed to engage several hundred people interested in this infrastructure and how it can be used.

What are the challenges you have been facing (regarding your tasks)?

Stefan: The biggest challenge that we faced from the beginning of this project was that this idea of a federated open web search infrastructure is not known and not yet well understood by many people, all the way from the layman on the street up to the policymakers. This means the challenge was to have people understand that not only a big hyperscaler from the US can build search engines and the underlying web index, but that it’s also possible to do this in a cooperative and federated manner across European computing centers and to have people cooperate and actually build such a web search ecosystem.

Which milestones do you plan to achieve in the remaining months?

Stefan: Since we’ve already reached the nominal end-of-project time and we’re currently in a six month extension phase. As said before, all major tech and non-tech milestones have already been reached. Now we use the remaining project time to further spread the word, wrap-up the developments, and get the idea transported towards policy- and decision makers at European Member State, European Commission, and Parliament level, so the idea can really make it to the awareness of the relevant people. In this way, it has a chance to be taken further, grown, and operationally implemented in Europe.

What makes the OWS project special to you?

Stefan: The OpenWebSearch.eu project is the backbone project of the European OpenSearch initiative. The OpenSearchFoundation has been working for many years to inspire such a project in Europe – a project that’s very close to the DNA of the OpenSearchFoundation and is actually the core of what we always wanted to achieve and what we will try to work on future.

Do you already have plans for the time after the project ends?

Stefan: Yes, of course. The project was an important means to get the idea of a federated web data infrastructure and open web search piloted and to demonstrate that it works. Now we have to take it to scale and make sure it gets further funding in European member states as well as from European funding sources, to further grow and scale the infrastructure and its uptake. This is what we will be working on in the coming months and years to help strengthen European digital sovereignty.

Thank you for the interview!

Read more about the Open Search Foundation: Open Search Foundation e.V.