I have always had a little bit of a disliking for authority. I believe no person has domain against another and that the centralization of power is based on the assumption that others have domain over us. Because of that mentality, I was immediately drawn to the crypto space, which I originally heard about during the earliest days of Bitcoin. I didn't take any action then because I didn't think there were enough people who shared my distrust for it to work.

I sure was wrong.

I've recently gotten involved in investing in crypto organizations that have a use case that has a good business use and is focused on decentralization. One organization I discovered that I really love is Presearch.org.  (If you click on the link and sign up, we will both get 25 PRE once you have earned 50 PRE from searches.) I'm going to start by telling you why I love them and then explain the experiment I am running from April 8- March 5 to see where nodes on Vultr performed best.

Time for disclosure: I currently hold 2,082.5 PRE as of 4/8/2021 at 1:15PM PST

What is Presearch?

Presearch is a Canadian-based crypto organization that has the goals of creating a decentralized search engine and advertising platform that is run by independent node operators. Currently the nodes are in the testnet phase. You can learn more about their nodes at nodes.presearch.org/. You can start a node for free, but if you stake 1,000 PRE (their token), you'll earn PRE for supporting the network.  

Reasons I love Presearch

As I told you in the intro, I love what Presearch is doing. Here's the reasons why:  

1. I get paid for up to 30 searches a day. Currently it's about .12 PRe per search, which comes out to around a penny. Not a ton of money, but Google uses your data for everything and they don't pay you a dime unless you sell their products for them. 30 meaningful searches is easy cause I write for a living.

2. They are involved with an alliance for ending big tech. This will hopefully make it easier for smaller players to improve income inequality over time.

3. Their CEO does weekly updates you can find on their YouTube channel and other sites.. Love the knowledge and progress they share.

4. If you run a staked node, it appears to be a 30% ROI. I've currently been running 2 staked nodes on the test net for 2-3 days now. Current earnings are 7.3573 PRE

5. Their CTO is discussing challenges with node operators daily on Telegram.

6. They offer keyword staking. It’s similar to an auction on Google, but it’s way better ROI. 1,000 PRE (approximately $100) allows you unlimited clicks currently. That’s a big deal for companies because the CPC for a lot of industries is high. Commonly $.25+ per click. With conversion rates of 5% for most industries that means on Google you might get 400 clicks and max 50 sales. I’d take advantage of this if you own a business. Check out their info on Keyword staking

7. They share Libertarian principles. It's nice to participate in organizations that share similar goals to the values I hold.  

What is staking?

Staking works by backing the network with your PRE owned. In exchange you get a reward. The rewards are subject to change but are currently based on the number of queries answered and the reliability of your nodes. There are currently around 1,200 staked nodes. If you want to stake a node, I found this to be the easiest guide to use : https://www.publish0x.com/earnings0x/presearch-nodes-a-comprehensive-guide-to-run-a-presearch-nod-xnqpgxk. Make sure to tip them if you find it as beneficial as I did.

If you want to help support my writing about organizations that are fighting, you can sign up for a Vultr account to get $100 free credits, but they need to be used pretty quickly which is why I am running this test.

What are you testing on Vultr?

I am testing all the locations to see which work best for earning the most PRE while it operates on the testnet. I used the following settings:

• CPU: 1 vCore
• RAM: 1024 MB
• Storage: 25 GB SSD
• Bandwidth: 1000 GB
• Ubuntu 18.0.4
• Cloud Computing

Each Node costs $5/mo and they offer the following locations:

All but the Los Angeles and Dallas ones were set up on 4/8/2021 in about a 2 hour time frame and are unstaked. I staked LA and Dallas 2-3 days beforehand and am averaging about 2 per day. I'm wanting to know the following conditions:

Which Nodes currently get:

1. The most searches?

2. Which nodes have the highest reliability score?

3. Which nodes have the lowest latency?

Current status of un-staked nodes as of 1:43PM PST:

Staked nodes as of 1:47 PM PST on 4/8/2021:

It should be noted that I am not providing the latency scores at this time because when you start the node, there will be no scores and they gradually ramp up over time. I will start posting full updates next week through May 5th, 2021 when I will post my final conclusions. 

If you find the helpful, make sure to follow me and toss me a tip from publishOx tipping pool.

Thanks!

Brandon

EDIT April 11, 2021: The Sydney and Miami Nodes went down for approximately 12.5 hours today before I noticed it so that will impact the comparison of them. I will include the time stat so that people can get an idea of the difference it makes in the rankings. 

Edit: April 14, 2021: The Seoul Node was down for about 12 hours today. Today is the 6th day of them being up and running. Tomorrow I will post the results of the week.

Edit: April 18, 2021: It took me a while to actually getting around to posting the results, but I calculated them at the 7 day mark. I have separated the results for the staked and un-staked nodes to make it easier to compare. The un-staked nodes are basically to see whether there are better server locations to use based on how they perform so that I and anyone who views this can get the best results from their PRE.

Week 1

Below is data on my staked nodes and the ones without PRE staked. I hope to eventually have about 20 staked nodes across the globe but will probably have them on a variety of platforms. Understanding which platforms and locations perform better will be useful for maximizing returns.

Staked Results

The staked nodes were started approximately 2 days apart so I had to normalize them to calculate the returns. 

Their returns are documented in table below:

I'd like to make several observations here. The gateway is supposedly based near San Francisco so I would expect given all equipment is equal that the one in LA would perform better because of the shorter distance. It is not currently. It has been improving since these figures were performed so we will see in future updates whether this will improve.  I would also like to see higher latency scores and lower average latency as these impact how fast the search results are delivered to the user. You'll see why I make this comment after you see the results for the nodes that are not staked.

Nodes without Stake

The green means they are performing better that either the average or median nodes. I took some liberty in selection because just using one statistic gave no locations where all statistics were better than better performing of the median and average.

Here are the minimum, maximum, average, and median values for the nodes performance.

The primary variable impacting search results was the time the node was active. 3 were down for about 12 hours, but the ones that stayed up consistently were all within one to two searches of each other, suggesting that the distance from gateway does not currently impact the number of searches received.

Just over had a lower latency score than the median node and six had a better latency score. Again I could not tell that the latency score is heavily impacted by the distance from gateway. Nor could I tell the reliability score was impacted by distance. Assuming this trend holds true, it would lead me to believe that the primary driver of where to launch nodes should be based on which servers perform best.  If these numbers hold true, I will be altering my strategy in the near future.

I'll post again once all nodes are 2 weeks old.

UPDATE: 4/19/2021: The Silicon Valley node is now a staked node.

UPDATE 4/20/2021: Toronto node went down temporarily. Will announce results during second weekly update.