The Book of Mwmbl #

Mwmbl is a free search engine with a focus on freedom, user experience, and community.

  • Freedom: the code is open source under the AGPL license
  • User experience: there are no adverts and we prioritise speed and search quality
  • Community: the search engine serves the community and the community guides search engine rankings and development

We also need an organisation, Mwmbl Foundation, to manage and deliver this. This book is a blueprint for how to achieve our goals in the development of the search engine and the foundation.

The book is a living document in that it is continuously updated. This is the very first working draft of this document (published on 2nd December 2022), so expect a lot to change!

Mission #

Mwmbl’s mission is to benefit humanity by making the world’s knowledge accessible to everyone without bias or hindrance, guided by community instead of profit.

Vision #

Mwmbl will be the standard place that people go to search the web, because of its search quality, its speed, its freedom from ads and the influence of advertisers, and its reputation for promoting a more ethical internet. We will have an active community of supporters that help monitor and improve search quality, and volunteer their resources to help crawl the web.

Values #

Mwmbl values are important for how we interact with one another, how we work, and what we work on. They are also taken into consideration when ranking pages.

  • Seek Truth: we stand up for what is true and admit when we are wrong
  • Show Compassion: we freely give our time, our attention and our wealth out of love for others
  • Encourage Respect: we stand up for those that are oppressed or disadvantaged
  • Champion Diversity: we celebrate and encourage diversity of all types and believe it makes us stronger
  • Preserve Privacy: we believe people should be able to use the internet without fear of surveillance or loss of privacy

Curating the Web #

Mwmbl volunteers (Mwmblers) are responsible for curating the Mwmbl view of the web. Every search engine has its biases. Advertising-based search engines are likely to be biased towards pages that make a profit for that search engine. Mwmblers will have their own biases, however we encourage Mwmblers to rank pages dispassionately and following the ranking guidelines:

  1. Results should be relevant to the query
  2. Results should be high quality
  3. Results should be compatible with Mwmbl values

In general, relevance takes priority when ranking.

Mwmbl Curated Sites #

Crawling is prioritised by giving a higher weighting to sites that our community champions. These curated sites are chosen by the community because they contain high quality content and are compatible with our values.

Blacklisting #

We believe that the web is big enough to get good results while restricting ourselves to those that benefit humanity. We are not afraid to remove results for sites that go against our values. For example:

  • Sites that do not respect users’ privacy
  • Sites that encourage violence towards any group
  • Sites that promote falsehoods

Blacklisting of a site should be by consensus of the Mwmbl community.