Perhaps you have seen one of the recent number of articles about Presearch, a search engine that pays you to use it, while it may sound good at first, one must ask the question, is it worth my time? Like the great variety of crypto faucets or other ways of earning such as ads through Brave, Presearch promises , more or less, passive earnings. A platform for earning crypto is only as good as the earnings it provides, so how does Presearch work? Is it reliable? And most importantly of all, is it worth your time?

Before drawing any conclusions on the viability of earning with Presearch, we have to understand how it works. Presearch is a collection of search engines. It has everything from Google to Duckduckgo concerning search engines, besides that it also allows for searches through other applications such as Netflix of Amazon. 

This is a sample of possible applications you can use 

The way you generate revenue is by searching through Presearch, where an ad will be displayed. Important to note is that these ads are not like normal flashy ads paid for by the advertiser, but rather these advertisements use a method that Presearch calls Keyword staking. If you want an ad on Presearch you first have to acquire some Presearch tokens. After that you can stake these tokens along with a word, say soda, and if you have the most tokens staked to the word, your ad will be displayed if someone searches for that word. In our example that would mean that if someone searched for soda and you had the largest amount of tokens staked to it then your ad would be displayed. The upside for the advertiser is that besides buying the tokens, this method of advertising costs no money, seeing as you retain the value of the PRE tokens.

But what about earning the tokens? You might ask. Simple! Every day you can earn up to 8 PRE tokens by utilizing the search mechanism, every search shows you one ad for three seconds then grants you 0,25 PRE. You can then withdraw your tokens when you have collected 1000 eligible PRE. So what is eligible PRE? Your Presearch account has a level assigned to it, the level depends on unknown factors, and depending on what level you are on a certain percentage of your total PRE can be withdrawn.

The Presearch account levels

We now know how it works but we know not how well it works, so how reliable is the service? This is where we start encountering issues. Firstly it takes 125 days at a minimum to be able to withdraw, provided you are between level 8 and 10, and if you don't utilize the full 32 searches a day it will take more than a third of a year to get the first payment. But if we ignore the large time frame of the payments and instead focus on the payments themselves there seems to be a second problem, the withdrawals are very slow and can take months if they even take place at all. Before you withdraw the tokens Presearch reviews the account to determine whether the searches were legitimate or not and then they adjust the user level depending on the investigation. This means that when you reach the 1000 required tokens you might be forced down to level 7 or lower, effectively making you wait multiple additional months before you can attempt another withdrawal. Besides moving the goal posts Presearch also reserves the right to terminate any account at any time for any reason, simply put they have total control and can remove you, Thanos style, in an instant.

This doesn't necessarily mean that Presearch will never pay, but rather it should serve as a warning that the service is somewhat unreliable. While there are those who have had no luck with their withdrawals there are also those who have been able to cash in their PRE.

Lastly is all of this worth it? Does Presearch pay enough to justify it's use? If we ignore the problems of withdrawal and arbitrary termination for a moment and focus solely on the money, I would argue that it is worth it. It is worth it because the potential earnings over the period of a month is, at the current price, around 4 dollars. That might not sound like a lot but when you compare it with most faucets and consider that it requires nothing but a minimal amount of time to earn, it starts to sound pretty good. But seeing as the other aspects musn't be ignored I come to the conclusion that the suspicious actions of Presearch and the sly termination clause in addition to the slow and burdensome withdrawal all make this a project that I don't think is worth your time.