I couldn't work out what "building blocks" they're going to produce. Are they going to produce a public index, that search engines can use? A set of APIs?

> the researchers will develop the core of a European Open Web Index (OWI) as a basis for a new Internet Search in Europe.

That sounds as if building an index is at least within scope. But isn't the design of the index one of the key differentiators between different search engines? Perhaps the OWI will just produce tools for building transparent, privacy-preserving search engines, rather than crawling the web itself. It's not clear (to me) from reading the site.