Open-Search was invited to participate in the Forum on Quaero at the Jan van Eyck Acadamie in Maastricht, September 29 and 30, 2007. The purpose of the forum was to question and investigate the European intentions to build a search engine and, broader, to investigate the cultural, political, and philosophical issues related to information search and access. It turned out to be a critique on centralized search engines and a plea for systems like Open-Search: decentralized, open and privacy respecting. Following is an elaborate report and my impression of the two day forum on Quaero.

In a well documented case of censorship, google again shows its true meaning of "don't be evil".

Open-search is asked to participate in a public think tank on the politics of the search engine. The forum is brought together by Quaero, a consortium of technology firms and research labs working together on multimedia and web search projects.

Koen's has written an article about Google as the Microsoft of the 21st century. It can be found here (in Dutch). Another interesting (Dutch) article about Google, by Michiel Leenaars from gridnet.nl is Google's verklikkernetwerk.

Apart from developing (see our previous post) we are also very busy giving presentations about open-search. Last week at versgeperst.info Tomorrow at ISOC.nl and Monday at the Holland Open Source Conference.

closing in on the holland open.

peer to peer to peer

So, last friday I had to visit google NL hq for business related matters. It is located near station Amsterdam Zuid, in one of the new buildings in the area that is to become the 'south axis'. On ground level, shadow reigned. High-rise buildings obscure the sky, and i doubt the sun will ever reach down to the entrance of the building. At the 15th floor, i was greeted by a NDA that wanted to be signed. After doing so i was allowed to enter the realm of google NL.

With the second workshop, we released the alpha version of our search client. Not much of the projected functionality is present, but it does provide the general framework that will be extended with various plugins. The second workshop, next to being the official release event of the client, is also the starting point of more community involvement.

It has been about four months ago that we started this project off with the support of digital pioneers. So it is time to look back a bit, and look forward.

We'll have a blog with more info soon.

On March 31 2007, we were part of a panel on (cyber)dissidents and restrictions at the impakt festival.

open-search development is slightly behind schedule!

The credits and idea can be found here

You can read and comment on it @ http://doc.open-search.net

We are currently visiting congresses and workshops like 23c3 and FOSDEM '07 to gather extra input and build a community of volunteers.