The digital transformation of society depends on the ability to find, access, and interpret trustworthy information. However, much of today’s search and discovery infrastructure is dominated by global platforms whose opaque business models raise concerns regarding privacy, transparency, and trust. This dependency limits Europe’s capacity to ensure technological autonomy and digital sovereignty. In this context, the NGI Search project was created to rethink how search and discovery technologies can serve the public good and strengthen a human-centric digital ecosystem aligned with European values.
NGI Search’s overarching objective is to empower a new generation of innovators, researchers, and entrepreneurs to design open, trustworthy, and privacy-respecting search solutions. Its mission contributes directly to Europe’s strategic ambition of achieving digital sovereignty by advancing technologies that are transparent, ethical, and aligned with social needs. The project places particular emphasis on openness, inclusiveness, sustainability, and respect for human rights.
A defining feature of NGI Search is its distributed funding model: 80 percent of its budget is dedicated to third-party innovators selected through five competitive open calls, with the remaining resources supporting mentoring, coordination, and communication. This bottom-up approach has resulted in a portfolio of 51 funded projects spanning privacy-aware search engines, misinformation detection, ethical AI, domain-specific services in health and food, and new uses of large language models for search and discovery. All funded projects are open source, with over 75 percent delivering deployable code, reinforcing Europe’s competitiveness in the search and discovery domain.
NGI Search provides beneficiaries with comprehensive mentoring, business model development, and visibility at major open-source events such as FOSDEM and OW2con. It also fosters synergies with sister initiatives, including the Open Web Search project, ensuring coherence within the wider NGI ecosystem. Through its ecosystem activation activities, NGI Search identified over 36,000 potential innovators across Europe, creating a vibrant network of “NGI Searchers” committed to open and trustworthy technologies.
The project integrates the social sciences and humanities as a core element of its design. All funded projects undergo ethics reviews and consider societal impacts such as fairness, transparency, gender balance, and sustainability. This ensures that technical developments are grounded in human values and ethical principles.
The expected impact of NGI Search is visible across multiple dimensions. Technologically, it has advanced privacy, transparency, and user trust. Economically, it has supported innovative SMEs and research teams to reach market readiness, with over 20 percent expected to achieve adoption within two years. Strategically, it strengthens Europe’s leadership in human-centric search and discovery systems. By promoting open, ethical, and sustainable innovation, NGI Search lays the foundation for a future in which citizens, researchers, and businesses can rely on digital services that truly serve the public interest.
