Open Web Search Europe (OWS.EU)

About OWS.EU

“Free, open and unbiased access to information – we have lost these core principles in web search and urgently need to restore them. This is why openwebsearch.eu will create an open European infrastructure for internet search, based on European values and jurisdiction.”

These words by Michael Granitzer, the principle investigator of OWS.EU, capture our objective perfectly: to find a way in which we can offer Web search for Europe, without depending on Big Tech only. The Radboud IR team is a key scientific partner in this project, funded by the Horizon Europe programme, leading work package three that has the focus on how to create indexes of the crawled and pre-processed Web data. Of course, we also contribute to the other technical challenges and help demonstrate the outcomes of the project.

Your profile

• MSc student in computer science, data science specialization
• Knowledge of information retrieval and databases
• Excellent programming skills; ideally, an excellent grade for the Big Data project
• Ability to work independently
• Participate actively in discussions

Master thesis and internship opportunities

The project addresses a wide variety of topics in (Web) search, varying from Web document classification to the definition of search engines in a declarative manner for the so-called open websearch engines Hub. Project results should enable novel search applications in specific domains like science, as well as help integrate the Web as a source in personal search. We build upon other technologies developed in our research group, notably GeeseDB and the Radboud ENtity Linker. If you have an idea to study in context of this project, and you are not afraid of the challenges brought by doing things at Web scale, then we would love to talk to you.

Contact Arjen P. de Vries or Djoerd Hiemstra to discuss research opportunities.