Open Console — Summary
In the modern World, a website is not special anymore: all your competitors have one. As web-site owner, you need to actively work to attract visitors. Search Engines may help you to get discovered, and you certainly want to help them directing people to your site. Also other parties may have something to say about your website. We offer an infrastructure to share information about websites to improve the overall quality of working with them.
Our infrastructure has three interfaces, which are very distinctive:
- for website owners, to manage information about their website;
- for third party information Producers, who share their knowledge about a website; and
- for information users (Consumers), to use website knowledge for their automated tasks.
At the moment, factual knowledge about websites is wide-spread; often hard to find, in many cases monopolized. The "Open Console" infrastructure attempts to combine that knowledge into a network of cooperation.
When you read careful through our pages, you will see that the whole infrastructure has many purposes which we like to explain in detail. For now, most documentation is focused on use in the Search Engine context.
Breaking monopolies
By far the most used interface for website owners, is Google Search Console. It lets you prove ownership of your website, and then offers ways to improve the indexing of your website for the Google search engine and Google Maps. As reward, it will also show you all kinds of information that Google processes have collected about your website.
Google's competitors —like Bing, Yandex and Baidu— want to index your site as good as possible as well. They each have created their own attempt to contact website owners... but those are hardly used. In the Real World: knowledge is power. Open Console starts cooperation in sharing knowledge about websites to 1) improve the quality of internet services, 2) give any competitor a fair chance.
Privacy
Open Console will protect its data under EU law, which results in the best privacy protection. Website owners can monitor what other people say about them, and use their legal right to get it corrected.
The hardware will be hosted in the EU. Open Console will only use tools which are Open Source. The interfaces will (probably via an Association of Data Providers and Consumers) be kept open for everyone.
Open Console will not own any of the data shared, and is not responsible for the content by design. Data may be encrypted and offered for a price, as long as the (validated) owner of the website or domain can access it for free.
The project, Status
The first generation of Open Console focuses on building a data user community: we are actively contacting parties who can add information and who want to use information. Starting a community is a slow process.
Most current potential participants are collecting information to improve crawling and indexing of website content. Read about The Bigger Picture.
Funding
The project started as a side track of a bigger initiative, sponsored by the NLnet Foundation. It got supported (in many ways) by the Open Search Foundation (OSF).
Since July 2023, Open Console is a full project supported by OpenWebSearch.EU. More funding is needed for this large project.