Who controls the information? In this modern age, search engines have a distinct influence on the retrieval of information from the internet. Your average user will, when prompted with the need to look up information, go to google and look for the pages. This gives google power: when google decides a certain topic, company, organisation or whatever is not acceptable they can keep it out of the search result. In effect, the major search engines bias what the average user sees of the internet.

In order to remedy this situation, we came up with the OpenSearch idea: a search engine that is distributed, not under central control and therefore difficult to manipulate.