For further OWI development:

1. Growth: The current federated infrastructure is hosted by 5 European data centres. We are looking for further data centres, from the academic/public as well as commercial domain.
2. Funding: To scale the OWI, long term funding, incl. public funding, must be secured. The OWI should not be in the sole hands of commercial market players but aims for public ownership & curation.
3. Legalities: Currently, the OWI can be used under a research license; a commercial license is outstanding, due to pending legal clarifications, regarding GDPR, DSA and copyrights.

The OWI has crawled more than a Petabyte of web data to date, and is indexing approximately 100 million new URLs per day. Currently the focus lies on full text bodies, metadata like titles and descriptions, embeddings and text excerpts. Images and videos are not yet being indexed.

The OWI currently offers a TLR 5. There is massive scale-up potential for the European economy. In 2024 macro-economic market potential study establishe, that the OWI could achieve a return on investment within four years of operation, with a projected net benefit of around €4.5 billion over a decade. These benefits are believed to derive from economic gains and societal improvements such as strengthening European digital sovereignty and global techno­logical competitiveness across a wide range of industries and use cases. Find the full study for download here: https://openwebsearch.eu/the-project/research-results/market-potential-assessment-of-an-european-open-web-index/

The Open Web Index was modeled according to open-source standards. The Index is open by nature and research results from the project are publicly available on Github and Zenodo.

Replicability is therefore given, however, the true value lies in the federated web search and analytics infrastructure, which requires huge computing power and a solid network of long-term partnerships. Additionally, the fast-paced developments, especially in the AI domain, require continuous development resources to make the OWI adaptable to future technologies.

The federated, infrastructure-oriented and pan European approach to scale and operate the Open Web Index (OWI) as a public good ensures long term sustainability, once it is fully adopted and implemented in Europe.