Report on the 1st International Workshop on Open Web Search (WOWS 2024) at ECIR 2024

Sheikh Mastura Farzana, Maik Fröbe, Michael Granitzer, Gijs Hendriksen, Djoerd Hiemstra, Martin Potthast, Arjen P. de Vries, Saber Zerhoudi

Abstract: The first International Workshop on Open Web Search (WOWS) was held on Thursday, March 28th, at ECIR 2024 in Glasgow, UK. The full-day workshop had two calls for contributions: the first call aimed at scientific contributions to building, operating, and evaluating search engines cooperatively and the cooperative use of the web as a resource for researchers and innovators. The second call for implementations of retrieval components aimed to gain practical experience with joint, cooperative evaluation of search engines and their components. In total, 2 papers were accepted for the first call, and 11 software components were submitted for the second. The workshop ended with breakout sessions on how the Open-WebSearch.eu project can incorporate collaborative evaluations and a hub of search engines.Date: 28 March 2024.Website: https://opensearchfoundation.org/wows2024/.