Presearch bills itself as a ‘decentralized search engine, powered by the communty’. It has its own crypto token which you can earn just by using Presearch instead of your usual search engine. I thought it seemed like an interesting idea with potential to be very cool, so I have been testing it out for the last few months. Here are my experiences and thoughts:
In addition to their own search results, you can use the Presearch search box to find things from a wide variety of sources. For example, you can use it to search Google or DuckDuckGo, you can use it to search block explorers for major blockchains or to search CoinMarketCap.com. You can also customize the list of sources which appear underneath the search box and allow you to type your query and then click the source afterwards to make the search. I found this very useful. I use the crypto related searched – coinmarketcap and block explorers – quite often and it saves me time having to open those sites first and then perform my search once I am there.
The Presearch search results pages themselves are pretty good, and that surprised me. I have tried other search engines before and abandoned them because they never surfaced what I wanted at the top of the results. Most of the time I use their own results, and only go to Google for converting currencies (or other things) and on very rare occasions when I Presearch doesn’t bring up what I want. The ‘infinite scroll’ design on the results, instead of discrete pages, is a nice feature that makes it even more pleasant to use.
The rewards you get as a regular user are not very high, but then it isn’t really supposed to be a way to earn real money. Since I feel like the service is worth using even without them, the rewards are a nice little bonus – kind of like the loyalty rewards you might get from a high street shop.
The commitment to privacy is good, as is the commitment to being open and transparent about the way results are ranked. One of the things I have really started to dislike about Google is the scandals (they are scandals in my opinion) where it seems that results have been influenced by political opinions of the people working for Google.
Overall I think it is worth using today, but what really excites me is the potential for the future. Community involvement in decision making is awesome as an idea, but still not implemented as far as I can see. Also I would really like to see some kind of decentralized search spiders and indexing, so you can mine the tokens by contributing your computer to running the service.
I will keep using Presearch for the foreseeable future, and would score it at around 7 out of 10 (with the potential to reach 9 or 10 if they keep developing it along the lines they have suggested).
You can join using my referral link here: https://www.presearch.org/signup?rid=821748
