Open Console — Current situation
The big search engines in the world are Google, Bing, Yandex, and Baidu. Worldwide, Google is the leading search engine with a market share of more than 90% of the searches. However, there are big local differences: in China, for example, Baidu has a big market share. In the more Russian oriented countries, Yandex has more market share.
These existing search engines do not share information: it gives the bigger ones a competitive advantage over arriving alternatives.
- Current situation
How Search Engines discover your site
Erecting a website is a lot of work. How will people find it? Usually, they find your site via a Search Engine, like Google Search or Microsoft Bing. These Search Engines need to take all images and texts from your website, to make you findable. This is done by their "Crawlers" which regularly download your website (typically once per three months).
When you take no further effort, Search Engines may find your site by themselves, although this will only happen when any other (already indexed) webpage from another website refers to a page on your website. This does not always work well: quite a large percentage of websites is not indexed everywhere.
When you are the owner of a website, you can inform search engines pro-actively. Register yourself via a special website of each of the existing search engines, and your site will get indexed quickly. These websites let you help them indexing your site better, but also provide useful feedback about themselves and visitors.
Prove ownership
Each search engine has it's own "console". The owner of a website must create an account on each of those consoles separately, and prove ownership for each website all over again. This authentication process can be done in several ways, for example code insertion into the homepage, creating a page with a certain name or creating a TXT or CNAME record in DNS. Again this has to be done for each of those consoles and adds, removes and changes have to be done through each of those consoles separately. Wouldn't it be easier for a website owner if all of those changes can be entered through one common infrastructure, and be shared between the search engines?
At the moment, it is possible to import authenticated websites from Google Search Console into Bing's Webmasters. However, that information is kept synchronized, incomplete, and not shared with other competitors.