Disclaimer: Do your own research, nothing I write is financial advice. All presearch links use my referall code.
There is a new alternative to Google called Presearch that aims to be a decentralized privacy friendly search option. Why should you consider an alternative, especially if you already use Google's products? Everyone else uses Google after all, why shouldn't you?
When you use Google, you aren't technically paying them any money to use their services, but you are paying with your personal data. Google has grown from just another search engine in it's early days to become a cyberpunk-esque mega-corp that controls a large portion of internet traffic and vast troves of precious data. Everything that is wrong with Google today can be summed up by the fact that their motto used to be "Don't Be Evil", but they erased all mentions of this motto in 2018. I guess they no longer care about not being evil! The vast majority of search engine users use Google automatically without thinking twice, it's often set to be the default search engine on phones and internet browsers. With over 90% of all searches going through Google, you can almost call it a monopoly. The main problem with this is that Google doesn't care about your privacy at all. Although they claim to now be pivoting to a more privacy friendly ethos (they are just pretending to care in my opinion), Google has a long history of collecting massive amounts of data on it's users. Do you really want some giant tech company knowing every single thing you have ever searched for? Google saves all your searches, every video you watch on YouTube, your location history, what kind of phone you own, who your contacts are, what you buy, etc. Users opt in, knowingly or not, to this data collection by using the vast suite of "free" Google Services. Millions of people store their personal emails, photos, and documents on Google's services, use Google Maps to get directions, store important appointments in Google Calendar, and use the Google App store to download apps. If you use multiple Google products, this means they pretty much know way too much about you and your life. The amount of power this data gives them is down right scary, and people continue giving them more personal data for free every single minute of every single day. Data is the new oil in our increasingly interconnected and digital world. It literally is a valuable commodity that is packaged up and sold to the highest bidder. You generate valuable data every time you use the internet or your phone. This data is used to create a unique profile of each user allowing advertisers to target them with personalized ads. This data isn't just used for advertising though, it is used for a whole myriad of purposes. It can be used to make predictions, analyze trends, bet on financial assets, target you for blackmail, etc. You should do everything in your power to protect this data, you wouldn't give away other assets so why should you give away your data for free? You can take some of the power back, starting today, by de-googling your life.
If you care about your privacy, but you still use Google, then it's time to start looking for alternatives. Luckily there are great alternatives ro replace every single service that Google offers starting with the biggest Google product of them all, the Google search engine. I made the decision to de-Google my own life last year and that was when I first discovered Presearch. At first I was skeptical about the project, and wondered how exactly they were going to pay me to search the web. I assumed that the Presearch token was probably almost valueless and illiquid. It turns out that it's listed on several major exchanges such as KuCoin, HitBTC, and Uniswap. Eventually after seeing it recommended a number of times I decided to at least give it a chance. I read their vision paper and was quite impressed with the scope of the project.
Presearch is a search platform that began development in 2017 and has come a long way since then. Presearch makes a great home page, you can search using Dsearch (Which is Presearch's properitary search engine), Google(without giving up your personal data like you would if you search through Google directly from Google.com), Youtube, Etherscan, Twitter, Coingecko, Coinmarketcap, or all of these at once. You can get wherever you need to go right from presearch.org and it is my home page. At the moment I am earning 0.12 $PRE per search, and I can earn up to 8 $PRE a day (about USD 0.80), just for doing the searches that I would be doing anyways. I believe the technical term for this is "free money."
More importantly than the $PRE tokens you can earn, Presearch gives users complete control over what kind of information they share with the platform and complete privacy is the DEFAULT setting. There can be no understating just how important this is, because most users aren't going to go digging through the settings to make a service more private. Google and other big tech companies are aware of this and this is why they do the opposite and force users to change a bunch of settings to regain their privacy.
Presearch has a lot of room to grow as a project, currently they process about 10 million searches a month and have 1.5 million users, which is impressive but is still tiny compared to the 3.5 billion searches that Google processes every single day (as of 2019 https://www.oberlo.com/blog/google-search-statistics). If Presearch manages to capture even a small percentage of that traffic they will be a formidable pro-privacy force in the market. I think Presearch tokens could become very valuable in the future if the platform grows as much as I think it will. The tokens have a unique use case called "keyword staking." Basically anybody who wants to advertise to Presearch users can stake $PRE tokens to a particular keyword or phrase, and the advertiser with the most staked will get to display their ad when someone searches for that keyword or phrase. Given that there is a fairly limited max supply of 500 million tokens, advertisers are going to want to get as many of these tokens as possible if Presearch attracts more users. Can you imagine if when Google was first starting out that you could control advertising for certain high value keywords? Tesla might want to display ads when someone searches for electric car, for example, or AMD might want to advertise to users searching for "best graphics card." How much would these companies pay to put their ads in front of millions of people searching for these terms? Once they realize the potential, I think there might be a $PRE supply shock. You can own a piece of this potential by simply directing the searches that you were going to do already for free on Google through Presearch. Not only can you earn, but you are also helping to support the decentralization of the internet and putting power back into the hands of users instead of big corporations. There really isn't a rational reason to be using Google instead of Presearch.
One of the ways I judge a project is by when they launched. If it was before or during the bear market of 2018, did they continue working on the project through it or did they become a zombie project only coming back to life in the resurgence of the recent bull market? This is how you can judge just how dedicated a project's team is. Presearch fits this criteria, they were founded and had an initial token sale in the 2017 bull run but the beta version of their search engine wasn't launched until April of 2018. They continued to make progress throughout 2018 and 2019 despite $PRE token's very discouraging price action. The token went up for a little while after launching but then spent the entire period between January, 2018 and November, 2019 going straight down. Despite the token cratering during this time, the Presearch team delivered on several project milestones, including launching the Beta version of the search engine which opened it up to all users, launching the referral program, and releasing a browser extension, along with several new features. During this time they reached the 1 million users milestone. A lot of people might have given up, but the Presearch team focused on delivering a good platform rather than worrying about price action. The token has since recovered and it is gaining strength, going from a low of less than 2 tenths of a cent or 1500 Sats up to five cents before the Covid Crypto Crash, after which it consolidated sideways for the rest of 2020. In January, $PRE took off once again and reached a high of over 12 cents this month! Much of this price recovery is probably related to the fact that Presearch decided to burn half of its total token supply, 500 million of them.
Whereas Google is a publicly traded corporation beholden only to profit and it's shareholders, Presearch has a different model in mind. Although at the current moment in time Presearch is also a corporation, it has a roadmap in place to transition control to a nonprofit foundation and a DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization) governance model. This transition is supposed to take place after Presearch becomes fully self-sustainable from revenue generated by advertising and token sales. Eventually their goal is to become a net buyer of $PRE tokens, funneling advertising revenue back into increasing the value of the token. Presearch is currently researching a variety of DAO models and trying to determine what kind of governance will work best for them. Not only is Presearch going to adopt decentralized governance, but the search engine itself is becoming decentralized. Anybody who stakes $PRE tokens will be able to run a node and earn rewards for helping to maintain the network. Node rewards will automatically increase or decrease based on network capacity needs. As Presearch carefully transitions from centralized control to a fully decentralized network, it will become an increasingly important part of the future decentralized internet. I believe that Presearch has an excellent chance of becoming a top search engine, the advantages of using it over Google are simply too good to ignore. Obviously the team believes in the mission and aren't just in this for money otherwise I don't think they would have worked as hard as they did through the bear market cycle. This is all just speculation of course, but what I know for sure is that I will continue to use Presearch instead of Google because my personal data is just that, mine.
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