Presearch has built a decentralized search engine that offers some of the best search results currently available, rewards you for searching and values your privacy. The search engine currently counts more than 1.6 million registered users. Presearch has also become an easy on-ramp to cryptocurrency, as anyone using the search engine earns cryptocurrency by doing so.

Presearch was built to end the search monopoly and enable people to “take back the web”, as the team puts it. There’s a strong and like-minded community that supports the multi-phase project. Each phase progressively increases community involvement to ultimately lead to a fully decentralized and community-driven project.

In this post I’d love to share with you why people choose to use Presearch, what the ecosystem looks like, a little bit of the technology behind it and what’s coming up next.

Why do people use Presearch?

Now that you know we’re talking about a search engine, why would anyone want to step away from the search giant, Google? There’s multiple reasons for this:

• Improved search results
• User control over data and privacy
• Payment for contributing value to the ecosystem
• Decentralization of search ecosystem

The current version of the Presearch Engine employs nodes operated by community members to access data from existing search resources and data sources. By doing so, the search engine provides users with high quality search results from a range of source, to provide you with the most relevant information.

Virtually everyone searches the web every day, and as we do, we may not realize how much information each search discloses about us – information which, once disclosed, we can no longer control or even monitor. Presearch fights that loss of privacy by giving the user full control to restrict what, if any, of their information is disclosed or maintained (with full privacy as the default).

With other search engines, not only is control over this information lost, we also allow others to monetize that information, without sharing any of the proceeds with us – the users whose data is being used! Presearch gives its users a piece of that pie: users that search with the Presearch engine are rewarded with tokens, whether they decide to disclose personal information or not (by default this is not the case). After all, search queries are valuable, even when no personal data is shared. This is done through contextual (keyword) advertising rather than advertising based on search behaviour.

While Presearch is too complex to be decentralized from day one, it is designed to ultimately be owned and controlled by a non-profit foundation, which drives the value of the Presearch network into the PRE token held by the community. If you’re interested in that part, I’d recommend you read through the project’s Vision Paper.

What does the ecosystem look like?

PRE Tokens

PRE tokens are used throughout the whole ecosystem, by the project, by users, by advertisers and soon by node operators. This provides various use cases and many future possibilities.

Current uses include search rewards for using the search engine, referral rewards for inviting friends to start using the search engine, various ways to spend the token, keyword staking to advertise, development grants and various other use cases.

Future utility includes:

• Ad blocking: pay PRE to avoid seeing advertisements on the results page
• Inverse keyword staking: stake PRE against ads you find undesirable
• Data sharing rewards: control your data, data isn’t logged by default but by opting-in to share some data rewards are provided. This results in more relevant ads, improve algorithm, etc.
• Abuse reporting rewards: detect and remove abusive ads and get rewarded
• Relevance staking: vote on the relevance of search results to influence and improve global relevance ranking
• Node staking, node operator rewards & gateway staking: staking to (be rewarded to) power the decentralized search engine
• Data partner rewards: Receive PRE for data which helps the platform, or data providers could be paid in PRE for (relevant) traffic depending on the partnership

And utility options don’t just stop there.

Presearch Nodes

Presearch Node software can be installed by anyone on their computer or excess server capacity to help power the new Presearch decentralized search engine. By running node software, operators help crawl the web for the information needed to answer user search queries. In exchange for providing computing resources, those who stake PRE tokens to run search nodes can earn PRE rewards to offset the cost of hosting and provide incentive for more nodes to join the network and provide high-quality, reliable service.

Currently this is in closed beta. However, the team is slowly rolling the node-powered search experience out which will provide much higher quality search results, an overall improved user experience and a choice between full private search and local search (which uses city-level location).

Presearch Engine, Keyword Staking and Marketplace

The Presearch engine has been explained throughout this post. On top of the engine, the team has built an advertising platform powered by keyword staking. This enables anyone to commit an amount of PRE on any keyword and become the top staker of this keyword. By doing so, your ad will show up when people search for your keyword. This is incredibly interesting for users who want to promote their affiliate links, for business owners and for influencers who want to increase their audience.

To keep everything as easy as possible, the team has also built a marketplace on which PRE tokens can be purchased with cryptocurrency or fiat. This makes it easy for anyone to start advertising without needing to learn everything about the technology behind it. Advertising is currently free of charge.

Conclusion

This is Presearch in a nutshell. If you’re interested in doing more research yourself, you can do so at Presearch.io. The search engine itself can be found at Presearch.org.

People search to solve problems, get questions answered, just like we search for things on Quora. It’s one of the most important things in life, and that is no exaggeration. Therefore, it's incredibly important we're aware of the options that are out there. To be aware how our data is (mis)used, and to be aware if we're being provided the most relevant (and neutral) information available.

I'll happily answer any questions in the comments as usual.