Vol. 3 (2021): Proceedings 3rd International Open Search Symposium #ossym2021, 11–13 October 2021 Online, hosted by CERN, Geneva, Switzerland

The Open Search Symposium - #ossym - with now its third edition, has become a vibrant meeting place for the ever-growing open search community—a community of scientists, developers, entrepreneurs, public organisations, concerned citizens and many more, to care for and thrive to develop the next generation of public, open and democratic internet search. In times when information, data, privacy, and separation of true and fake in the digital sphere becomes ever more important the open search community seeks to develop methods, tools, and technology to cooperatively crawl the web, generate substantial open web-indices and build a web search ecosystem that is governed by openness, ethics, respect of privacy as well as democratic and legal values.

With these first ‘fully-fledged’ proceedings of #ossym 2021 we are happy to kick-start a routine series of #ossym-proceedings aggregating and disseminating the articles and findings submitted to and presented at the yearly Open Search Symposia also in the years to come. It is great to see the quality and quantity of the contributions and we hope that these proceedings will help to raise awareness and may help to inspire even more active participation in the Open Search Initiative from all relevant scientific, societal, public, and economic domains.

We hereby kindly want to thank all the active authors, contributors and supporters of #ossym series for making the #ossym conference an interesting and dynamic place for discussing and developing the next generation of internet search - for the current and future users of an democratic, fair and open Internet – for us all.

Together, for a better net.
Andreas Wagner, Michael Granitzer, Christian Gütl, Christine Plote and Stefan Voigt