Starnberg: The Open Search Foundation wants to compete with Google – Starnberg

Anyone who surfs the Internet leaves traces. A click here, a search engine query there – and boom, appropriate advertising pops up a little later. Everyone knows, so far nothing new. Just how big are these tracks really? How do search engines shape our view of the world? And what can be done against the omnipotence of Google? After all, more than 90 percent of all search queries in Europe run through the provider from Silicon Valley in California.

The Open Search Foundation (OSF), based in Starnberg, is dedicated to these questions: The NGO, founded in 2018, denounces the monopoly of the US tech group Google and the problems associated with it – and wants to strengthen its supremacy in Europe in the long term by developing its own break search engine. “We want to help strengthen Europe’s digital sovereignty,” explains OSF board member Stefan Voigt. The OSF sees the power of the private US company as an “invitation to abuse and manipulation”. That doesn’t mean that Google accepts this invitation every day. But according to Voigt and Christine Plote, also on the OSF board, the possibility is there.

Instead of the “black box Google”, Voigt and Plote, together with their team, which consists of lawyers, media and computer science professors, are planning a transparent system in which – unlike Google – the processes and algorithms involved are comprehensible determine which hits are displayed at the top when searching the Internet.

Because studies show: The first results are noticed by the users, everything else is often dismissed as irrelevant. But: “The best search results are not always at the top,” explains Plote. Because the search engines themselves decide on the “ranking”, i.e. the order of the search results. And because of the non-transparent processes in the background, one does not know what influence the search engines have on it. “There are definitely self-interests behind this,” says Plote, “often an economic interest, as in the case of the advertising group Google, or a state interest, as in the case of Baidu, the largest Chinese search engine.”

In addition, the US company Google collects data about its users in order to better tailor the results to individual interests. And plenty of it. “It’s really bad,” says Voigt, who studied geography and does research at the German Aerospace Center (DLR). “Many are not even aware of the information Google collects about you.”

The OSF received 8.5 million euros in funding from EU funds

For advertising strategists like Google itself, information about users is worth its weight in gold. However, they lead to different results being displayed to two different people when they enter the same thing in the search field – depending on where the user is at the moment and what they were previously looking for. “The search engine decides what it shows us,” says Plote.

Stefan Voigt and Christine Plote want to develop a more democratic search engine.

(Photo: Nila Thiel)

In addition to Google’s influence, this leads to another phenomenon, the filter bubbles, which are often discussed in media and social sciences. The problem with this: Users are only shown content that corresponds to their own worldview and supports their views. This makes it difficult to look beyond one’s own nose – and thus the democratic discourse. Because there is no need to deal with contrary points of view.

For its open, non-commercial search engine, the OSF works with various bodies such as the Leibniz computer center of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences. The renowned European nuclear research center CERN based in Geneva is already on board. There are also various specialist groups with experts, including an ethics committee and a legal committee, which deal with the issue of governance. Because even with the OSF model, someone has to decide which search results are considered relevant.

Unlike Google, however, no group should decide alone, but groups of experts and users together. Similar to Wikipedia, as many people as possible should be able to contribute their experiences. “It has to be organized as decentrally as possible,” explains Voigt. Fake news should also be recognized and marked as far as possible. The OSF received 8.5 million EU funds for its project. The pilot project should be completed in the next three years, and Voigt estimates that the first Open Search search engines could be available in six to eight years.

Until then, Voigt and Plote have a few practical tips for more privacy online. The simplest: Use search engines like Duckduckgo or Ecosia, which access significantly less data than Google. And switching browsers more often helps to reduce your digital footprint.

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