The Proceedings of the first Workshop on Open Web Search (WOWS), which took place on 28 March 2024 in Glasgow, UK, are now published in the CEUR Workshop Series as Volume 3689.
WOWS 2024 had two calls for contributions. The first call targets scientific contributions on cooperative search engine development. This includes cooperative crawling of the web and cooperative deployment and evaluation of search engines. We specifically highlight the potential of enabling public and commercial organizations to use an indexed web crawl as a resource to create innovative search engines tailored to specific user groups, instead of relying on one search engine provider. The second call aims at gaining practical experience with joint, cooperative evaluation of search engine prototypes and their components using the Information Retrieval Experiment Platform TIREx. The workshop involved a keynote by Negar Arabzadeh from the University of Waterloo, 8 paper presentations (5 full papers and 3 short papers accepted out of 13 submissions), and a breakout session with participant discussions. WOWS received funding from the European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation program under grant agreement No 101070014. We would like to thank the Program Committee members for helpful reviews and suggestions to improve the contributions to the workshop. Special thanks go to Christine Plote, Managing Director of the Open Search Foundation for the WOWS 2024 website.