French search engine project Ibou, advocating for respect for publishers, launches its Explorer platform with the support of Xavier Niel.
A new French player aims to establish itself in the highly dominant online search market. The company Babbar announced on Wednesday the launch of the public beta version of Ibou Explorer, the first component of a complete conversational search engine project named Ibou. Backed by industry veterans, the project also confirms the entry of influential entrepreneur Xavier Niel into its capital alongside historical investors Go Capital, Bpifrance, and Normandie Participations.
A project of sovereignty and content respect
Ibou arises from a shared observation by many content creators: the trend of dominant search engines to provide direct answers, often generated by artificial intelligence, at the expense of websites that produce the information. “Ibou makes the opposite choice: highlighting sources, ensuring the pluralism of information, and respecting the will of publishers regarding the distribution of their content,” explains the company in its statement. The project is driven by a dual ambition. Firstly, to restore a more equitable ecosystem for content producers. Secondly, to build a sovereign alternative to American giants. Ibou relies on technology and an index that are 100% proprietary, developed in France, representing a strategic stake for French and European digital autonomy.
Ibou Explorer, a first gateway
The concrete first step of this vision is Ibou Explorer, a content discovery platform accessible to the public since March 2026. Designed as an alternative to recommendation feeds like Google Discover, it offers a selection of press articles and blogs, prioritizing editorial quality and diversity of viewpoints over algorithms based solely on engagement. This vertical will gradually be complemented by other modules – traditional web search, images, news – to ultimately form a complete conversational search engine.
The platform is accessible at the address https://explorer.ibou.io.
Significant support for a sizable ambition
To finance this ambitious development, Xavier Niel’s entry into the capital marks a decisive step. His financial and strategic support is expected to help the team materialize its vision.
“It’s a great encounter, centered around a passion for tech. Xavier shares our belief that it is possible to build a search engine that respects both users and content creators,” stated Sylvain Peyronnet, co-founder and CEO of Ibou.
An enthusiasm shared by the investor: “What convinced me about Ibou is primarily Sylvain and his team. These are people who know what they are talking about, who have already built something solid, and who have a clear vision of how to achieve a sovereign search engine. The rest will follow,” commented Xavier Niel.
A proven technological infrastructure
Behind Ibou is the company Babbar, co-founded in 2019 by Sylvain Peyronnet, former Chief Science Officer of Qwant, and Guillaume Pitel, a Ph.D. in computer science and computational linguistics. For the past five years, Babbar has built one of the largest European web indexing infrastructures, capable of analyzing up to 4 billion pages per day and with an index of over 2 trillion documents. It is on this solid and operational technological foundation that the Ibou search engine is built.
Ibou (https://ibou.io) is committed to promoting a more open, transparent, and sustainable web.
