The concept, if not quite the realisation, of Presearch represents the next phase in the technological idealism that brought us Bitcoin. It is to Google what Bitcoin is to banking and the world’s first attempt at an authentic ‘alt-engine’: a decentralised, blockchain search engine built on nodes that attract reward tokens (PRE) for the efficiency with which they are able to respond to search requests, whilst also rewarding user interaction and safeguarding privacy.

The reward system for operating nodes is comparable to the mining incentive that sustains Bitcoin and other proof-of-work based digital assets. But the processing power dedicated to any one Presearch node in its current form is thankfully nothing like as intensive as it is for crypto-mining. Node operators receive PRE tokens in proportion to the number of nodes they run, the quality and reliability of the internet connection and the amount of PRE tokens they stake on each node rather than the raw GPU power they can generate. Users are also rewarded with PRE tokens for active participation. 

The uniqueness of Presearch is in the transaction between user and search engine compared to that of Google. Google benefits financially from data gleaned from its user interaction and offers nothing beyond its search results in return: 

‘Data is currency, and consumers are willing to hand over their information in exchange for “free or convenience,” Schneier said. Companies such as Facebook and Google want the data so that they can sell more stuff. … “I like to think of this as a feudal model. At a most fundamental model, we are tenant farming for companies like Google. We are on their land producing data,” he said (Rashid, 2014).

With Presearch it is a very different contractual arrangement: Presearchers are rewarded for user interaction. Furthermore, their privacy is safeguarded through anonymous searching options and by not storing any personal data. Google, on the other hand, cannot function with privacy enabled and is dogged by accusations of search bias:

“Google is manipulating search and news results to bias them towards what it thinks it knows about people, based on the troves of personal data it has on them,” Weinberg told Yahoo Finance after Pichai’s Congress hearing. “This filtering and censoring of search and news results is putting users in a bubble of information that mirrors and exacerbates ideological divides.” (Cao, 2018).

Data I’ve collected since 2016 show that Google displays content to the American public that is biased in favor of one political party (Epstein & Williams, 2019) – a party I happen to like, but that’s irrelevant. No private company should have either the right or the power to manipulate large populations without their knowledge (Epstein, 2019, p. 1).

Presearch is offering a different kind of consumer experience and an alternative social contract. One based on a decentralised governance model that is fully democratic with voting rights for Precoin owners and for volume staked. A tokenomics model that is thought to be resistant to the narrow private commercial interests that killed off Google as a once decent service and rendered it the tool of big business and a superabundant resource for the intelligence community: 

“The NSA woke up and said? Corporations are spying on the Internet, let’s get ourselves a copy,'” Schneier said. Most NSA surveillance “piggybacks” what the companies are already doing, he said (Rashid, 2014).

Presearch aims to become the go-to search engine and ‘best search engine in the world’ (Presearch Vision Paper, 2021) by offering choice rather than the illusion of choice:

• Choice around privacy vs. personalization. 
• Choice around the kinds of search results you see and how you can direct the experience to your own benefit -- rather than algorithms driving you to content designed primarily to optimize corporate profits. 
• Choice to receive value out of the platform, in terms of both improved experience and rewards, directly corresponding to the value which you contribute to the platform. (Presearch Vision Paper, 2021)

So in terms of social utility it ticks a lot of boxes. And if it succeeds and reaches critical mass, not only will the value of PRE explode exponentially to the benefit of all its stakeholders, but there will be some breathing space within Google's suffocating monopoly and a viable alternative to its shady business model. 

Like Bitcoin, Presearch didn’t make a particularly big splash on entry considering its obvious social utility and is perhaps now obscured by the feeding frenzy of meme-coin hype. It doesn’t necessarily generate the level of publicity it deserves despite its several million users and millions of searches executed. But it is quietly running in the background and evolving into a fully decentralised search engine despite being far more complex to decentralise than any currency:

Search engines are complicated, and building a decentralized search engine provides some unique challenges which do not apply to centralized search engines. For example: how do you prevent malicious actors from running nodes and either stealing user information or returning dangerous or unwanted content? How do you get fast (hundreds of milliseconds) response times across a massively distributed network of servers with drastic variability in performance and reliability? How do you properly incentivize people to run nodes and fairly balance supply and demand for both nodes and searches within the network? Some of these issues Presearch has already solved, and some will require continued experimentation and innovation over time (Presearch Vision Paper, 2021).

References

Cao, Sissi. 2018. "Does Google Manipulate Your Search Results? Sundar Pichai’S Rival Says Yes, Explains How". Observer. https://observer.com/2018/12/google-search-algorithm-bias-duckduckgo-ceo/.

Epstein, Robert. 2019. "Why Google Poses A Serious Threat To Democracy, And How To End That Threat". United States Senate Committee on the Judiciary. https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Epstein%20Testimony.pdf.

"Presearch Vision Paper". 2021. Presearch.Io. https://www.presearch.io/vision.pdf.

Rashid, Fahmida. 2014. "Surveillance Is The Business Model Of The Internet: Bruce Schneier". Security Week. https://www.securityweek.com/surveillance-business-model-internet-bruce-schneier.