Will Presearch Change Searching?

Changing the way we look at search engines right now is a tall order. Google and Bing are heavy hitters when it comes to searching for information and it seems like it would be difficult to dethrone them.

But the way people are starting to look at privacy and centralized entities controlling what information we receive could be the ticket to changing that. Many people know that Google is capable of tracking almost everything you do on the internet, and much of that information gets shared by them. Advertisements are also a huge burden on users as many of the first search results you get are simply advertisements relating to your query and not genuine results.

Having said that, there are pluses to the existing search engines. Search Engine Optimization can offer some excellent results on Google and the speed of the engine is unmatched when compared to other browsers. Bing offers rewards for users using their service in exchange for gift cards and other rewards while the speed may not quite be there.

But how can Presearch build on these benefits and create a better engine?

Presearch has a couple things they are working on to build upon and improve these things. Rewards are a big part of it. Users genuinely utilizing the search engine (more info on that here) can earn .25 PRE per search (We’ll get into the token itself in a little bit) up to 8 PRE every 24 hours. Keyword staking minimizes ads to one per keyword depending on the ad with the most PRE staked to it. And running a node to encourage decentralization will earn you rewards if you stake over 1000 PRE.

Privacy is another piece of the puzzle. Presearch will store some data, typically data that you personally supply the platform and very little relating to your searches, but it won’t track your search queries or use third party cookies. This is a huge benefit to people trying to back away from the heavily monitored and tracked internet as a whole. A more indepth look on the privacy policy of Presearch is here.

Decentralization is the last piece to this. Nodes provide important security from malicious actors, and boost the speed of the service. As mentioned before, there is incentive to running nodes beyond just boosting the health of the ecosystem. As the community grows the service will become more secure, faster, and more stable in the event of node outages. More information on nodes can be found here in their Medium post on the subject. Looking at the roadmap lays out some other things coming to node including decentralized predictive text and the ability to search on decentralized indexes with nodes.

If you’re looking for more information on the ecosystem as a whole and the plans for the platform, check out their vision paper.

What is the PRE token?

Built on Ethereum, the PRE token incentivizes using the Presearch search engine. There is a total supply of 500 million, with 400 million in the circulating supply. We’ve already covered the current use cases of the token, but there are a few more of them in the works. Ad Blocking through the use of PRE will become available in the future. Although Presearch by default does not share data, sometime in Q4 2021 users will be able to opt into sharing some data in exchange for a PRE reward.

As it stands, PRE is sitting pretty comfortably around .10 on the markets. Coingecko has it up 9.3% in the last seven days and as the network grows I see the value of the token growing alongside it. Having said that, I won’t dive too deep into the growth of the token as that is beyond the scope of this post although I may take a deeper dive into it in the future.

What is Presearch doing right and what needs improvement?

I’ve been using Presearch on and off for a couple weeks now and I find that the results I’m getting on par with what I would expect from any of the other engines, without the presence of multiple ads for each search. Decentralization is also something that I find exciting for this so we no longer have to rely on large tech companies to provide us with our knowledge and instead can build a network with the community to drive it.

It’s important to note that search speed is probably what takes the biggest hit here. I haven’t found it particularly off putting, but some may be frustrated by a noticeable difference in time takes to get your results back. This is only a couple seconds, but when we’re used to the speed of Google you can definitely tell. The other flaw I noticed very rarely was an error due to not having nodes to fill the search request but a quick reload typically solved it.

It also has built in functionality to search popular crypto sites right from the search bar. Etherscan, CoinGecko, and Coinmarketcap are all integrated below the search bar so you can quickly choose which site you want to search. Similarly, searching for a coin or token will result in the CoinGecko results being shown immediately above the other results which is great for quickly checking the value of a coin.

It also includes shortcuts to search Youtube, Twitter, and a laundry list of other providers with a simple click before pressing enter or on the bar to the left of your results. Although a small touch, I enjoy this feature as it helps to cut down on time spent navigating from site to site.

I think Presearch is on the right track to try to fix what other companies are currently doing and I’m hopeful that increased exposure will result in widespread adoption of the service to a point where these additional privacy features switch being a nice option to being the expectation for search engines. I personally haven’t noticed a lot of issues with using it, and I expect the speed and stability issues will be resolved when the community of nodes grows.