CERN Market Share Analysis for February 2026

On 6 June, the OpenWebSearch.eu consortium released a pilot of a new infrastructure that aims to make European web search fairer, more transparent and commercially unbiased. With strong participation by CERN, the European Open Web Index (OWI) is now open for use by academic, commercial and independent teams under a general research licence, with commercial options in development on a case-by-case basis. The OpenWebSearch.eu initiative was launched in 2022, with a consortium made up of 14 leading research institutions from across Europe, including CERN. The project aims to build a public web index that offers an alternative to existing indexes held by companies like Google (USA), Microsoft (USA), Baidu (China) and Yandex (Russia). Web indexes provide the back-end data infrastructure behind search engines, and today the companies that manage them determine what content is searchable and how it is ranked. Currently, Europe does not have a search index of its own, making it vulnerable to digital dependence.  The OWI offers a clear alternative based on European values. The project’s cross-disciplinary nature, ensuring continuous dialogue between technical teams and legal, ethical and social experts, ensures that fairness and privacy are built into the OWI from the start. “Over thirty years since the World Wide Web was created at CERN and released to the public, our commitment to openness continues,” says Noor Afshan Fathima, IT research fellow at CERN. “Search is the next logical step in democratising digital access, especially as we enter the AI era.” The OWI facilitates AI capabilities, allowing web search data to be used for training large language models (LLMs), generating embeddings and powering chatbots. The CERN team has built key parts of the infrastructure that power the OWI’s crawling and indexing capabilities. This means that it tracks which webpages should be scanned. The system handles about 9 million URLs per hour, which equates to roughly 3 terabytes of pu