What is Presearch?
Presearch is a non-profit decentralized search engine powered by the community. Users receive rewards in the form of PRE tokens for searching the internet. Advertisers earn benefits for staking PRE for preferred keywords. Operators receive rewards after staking PRE and running nodes. PRE transactions are enabled by the Ethereum blockchain.
Why Presearch?
Aside from the rewards to users, advertisers, and node operators, Presearch offers a more transparent search engine that's both not for profit and community oriented. This transparency extends to the algorithms that determine rankings for keywords. In the future, more community involvement in the decisions and directions for Presearch is planned.
How Presearch?
Users can create an account and search through presearch.org or download a chrome extension for their browser. I chose the later option and added it to my cryptotab browser. From there, it's fairly straightforward in terms of searching. Presearch offers a series of shortcuts to other search engines on popular sites under its search bar. You can even customize the links that appear through the "edit search providers" icon.
Presearch Performance?
My first three searches were exact keywords I previously searched for work. The returns were basically the same as when I used google, albeit with different, or no, advertisement links. These searches were for academic subjects and articles. When I changed the search to crypto related terms, the returns were predictable and in some cases keywords were already "staked."
Staking Keywords/Advertising?
For those looking for low cost advertisements or affiliate marketers, Presearch offers an intriguing option. Currently, advertising is essentially FREE. Keywords are bid on. The highest bidder then stake the number of PRE tokens bid for the keyword. They still own the PRE tokens staked for the keyword but receive traffic and even rewards when the staked keywords are searched. I don't want to give away too much, but there are still a significant number of crypto related keywords that have not been staked, despite the fact that Presearch is over 2 years old with a community around 10,000 members.
Getting PRE
There are a couple of ways to get PRE tokens now. First, presale PRE is available through marketplace. The minimum buy is 1,000 tokens, with a price of $110 USD at the time of writing. Second, PRE is available on KuCoin. The current price is $0.09. Finally, you can earn PRE by joining and searching. I made the mistake of joining without a referral link and lost out on the 25 PRE bonus https://presearch.org/signup?rid=2325956
