ibou’s manifesto

Today, the tools that organise access to information optimise for the time you spend on them, not for what you get out of them. More and more often, they answer for you, without saying what they rely on, and without valuing the people whose work feeds those answers. We believe that the people who make and maintain the web contribute to the collective richness of human knowledge, and that they deserve to be recognised, cited, and visited.

We publicly declare our dedication to an open, public and sustainable internet.

This manifesto is a commitment to what ibou will and will not be.

To those who search

Informing your judgement, not replacing it

An answer should open up the question, not close it. We synthesise to save you time, never to spare you from thinking. You should always be able to go further, trace a claim back to what it rests on, and make up your own mind. The intelligence remains yours.

Showing you where every answer comes from

Every answer we produce cites its sources and links to them. An answer without a source is not an answer, it is a claim.

Serving human curiosity

We present you with a variety of sources, including ones you would not have searched for, and points of view that differ from one another. We do not reject personalisation, we refuse to let it lock you in.

To those who make the web

Respecting website publishers

We crawl the web at speeds adjusted to avoid harming servers, and in line with publishers’ instructions. If a site wishes to be crawled differently, we are attentive to its needs.

Recognising and valuing those who publish

Journalists, researchers, bloggers, academics, photographers, developers and many others: their work is the raw material of the web. We commit to making them visible and to sending an audience back to them, not an invisible citation. A search engine that does not value those who feed it dries up its own source.

Fostering an open internet

A search engine has a duty to help people discover what is publicly accessible, while protecting publishers’ wish to share their work on terms they control.

Working for a sustainable public internet

Defending an ecosystem in which no one should decide, in place of those who publish, what ought to be accessible.

Our actions

Building our own index

We control the whole chain: crawling, indexing and ranking. We do not resell anyone else’s index. Whoever owns the index decides what is visible: we refuse to delegate that decision, and we want Europe to have its own layer of access to the web, not just the rules that govern it.

Prioritising transparency

We communicate regularly about our crawling, indexing and ranking methods. Whether you are a user or a publisher, you should be able to understand how the engine works as a whole. To rank is to exercise power: we would rather acknowledge it, and explain algorithmic blind spots.

Contributing to a lean internet

The environmental footprint of digital technology is not negligible. We have chosen a frugal approach in building our engine.
For example, not using cloud services helps reduce the waste of computing resources.

ibou is not just a search engine. It is a promise of respect, transparency and contribution to a web where everyone is free to learn, share and grow.

We are not asking you to take our word for it, we are asking you to keep an open mind and judge on the evidence.

We defend an internet that remains a common good. An internet that remains open. An internet that respects those who keep it alive. An internet where the intelligence remains yours.

01To those who search