IbouBot

Something new

[SumGuy]

This is very new:

Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; IbouBot/1.0; [e-mail]; +https :// ibou.io/iboubot.html)

It did as for robots. Comes from a very small IP range ( 217.113.196.0/24).
AS210743 Babbar SAS

[Brett_Tabke]

that one actually looks interesting: [ibou.io...]

[not2easy]

I don't know whether barkrowler is still making the rounds, but it was from the same range and AS number:
Mozilla/5.0+(compatible;+Barkrowler/0.9;++https://babbar.tech/crawler)

Various older versions were linked in this April (2025) thread: [webmasterworld.com...]

[sylvainp]

Just to clarify : Barkrowler and Iboutbot are both managed by the Babbar company.

Barkrowler is the crawler for the tool Babbar.tech, mainly oriented towards SEO, this crawler extracts the web graph and computes metrics such as topical or antispam SEO. The tool is similar to majestic or other SEO tools.

Recently the company pivoted and started the development of a agentic search engine called IBOU. Iboubot is thus a search engine crawler.

Both crawler coexists but are independent.

Source : I am co-CEO of the company and chief architect of Ibou ;)

[lucy24]

:: riffle through raw logs ::

Oh. Fancy that. This month--and never before--it has visited a total of three times, each time requesting only robots.txt. It took some further investigation of logged headers to spot a minor header deficit that would lead to them getting the minimalist Disallow-everyone file. (I’d actually forgotten that this specific deficit gets them the minimalist version. I really should try to remember what my own site’s rules are ;) )

Perhaps I’ll poke a hole and see how they behave.

[sylvainp]

:: riffle through raw logs ::

Oh. Fancy that. This month--and never before--it has visited a total of three times, each time requesting only robots.txt. It took some further investigation of logged headers to spot a minor header deficit that would lead to them getting the minimalist Disallow-everyone file. (I’d actually forgotten that this specific deficit gets them the minimalist version. I really should try to remember what my own site’s rules are ;) )

Perhaps I’ll poke a hole and see how they behave.

I'm glad to read this : this is the expected behaviour, we wanted the bot to very obedient of the robots.txt rules.
The bot is active since this month (August 4th to be precise) and currently as we are doing extensive indexing tests it operates at small scale (roughly 600 millions pages per day as we speak).

[lucy24]

In the
:: counting on fingers ::
four weeks since this thread was last active, I had managed to entirely forget this robot's existence--in fact I was going to post about it as a new robot--and had consequently forgotten that I did poke a hole w/r/t one header.

I have since seen it again, and find it fully compliant. That is, it requests only what it is allowed to request, omitting roboted-out directories, and spaces its requests many seconds apart. Goood robot ;-)