Presearch - The Decentralized Search Engine powered by the community
Editorial
My main aim about the #SearchwithPresearch writing competition on Publish0x was to write an article about the evolution of Web Search Engines over the past 30 years and include a significant chapter narrating my review about Presearch and its contribution in this evolution of web search engine technology. Unfortunately, that article was banned from the platform and since the relevant chapter about Presearch resulted quite lengthy and detailed, I have decided to include there only a partial summary of my review and create an extended second article with a complete review about Presearch, the first decentralised Search Engine powered by the community. Eventually, the article about the evolution of web search engine technology has been published on read.cash without censorship here [The Evolution of Web Search Engines].
Genesis
Presearch, founded on 2017 by Colin Pape and Thomas Leclair, is a pro-privacy blockchain-based search engine that is using cryptocurrency tokens as an incentive to decentralize web search, hoping to loose Google's abuse over internet users search data. It is estimated that currently counts 2 million total registered users, and about 900,000 search queries a day.
In fact, the idea about Presearch was born over a decade ago out of the frustration of Colin Pape who was struggling to build and maintain a local listing online business only to have its efforts downranked by Google in its web search results.
That Silicon Valley-based online business named ShopCity.com, was founded in 2008 and it was intended to promote local businesses within the limits of metropolitan areas by offering a local search engine. Not as a local web business directory of the 90s like the ones of Yahoo! and Elon Musk's Zip2, but as a real localised search engine being in direct competition with Google in a metropolitan geographical level. According to Colin Pape's interview to TechCrunch:
“That was actually the real genesis moment behind [Presearch] — the realization of just
how big Google is. In 2011 we woke up one day and found out that 80-90% of our Google traffic had disappeared and all of these sites, some of which had been online for more than a
decade and were being run in partnership with city governments and chambers of
commerce, they were all basically demoted onto page eight of Google. Even if you typed them by name… Google had effectively, in their own backyard, shut down this local initiative. We ended up participating in this [FTC] investigation and ultimately it cleared Google
but we’ve been really aware of the market power that they have — and certainly what
could be perceived as monopolistic practices. It’s a huge challenge. Anybody
trying to do any sort of publishing or anything really on the web, Google is the
gatekeeper.”
Presearch Key Differentiation Framework
As it is defined in its Presearch Vision White Paper, Presearch believes that the best way to compete with this massive, centralized and monopolistic corporation as Google that currently dominates the global search engine market with a 91.45% share according to Oberlo.com, is to build a framework of a community-powered, decentralized search engine that provides quality results while protecting users privacy and rewarding them for their web searches. And based on this framework, the Presearch platform currently consists of the following components and experiences:
Providing Better Results with Presearch Web Search Engine
Operating as a conventional web-crawler, the Presearch Engine actually utilizes the power of world’s top search engines and websites in order to provide to internet users a compelling web search experience, by offering quality censorship-resistant results, protecting users privacy and providing them with more choices and control. For example, it provides to the users the choice to select the source of their results over a list of 100 search engines and websites.
The full list of these search providers can be found on https://presearch.org/account/search-providers.
It also provides an additional layer of data through community packages which makes those results even better. One such package, inspired by Pape's initial online business shopcity.com, is the capability of search results localisation available on https://engine.presearch.org/.
Furthermore, by being a blockchain-oriented search engine, Presearch has embedded since June 2020 an extra crypto package powered by CoinGecko.com in order to improve its cryptocurrency search results.
Privacy-oriented & Decentralised Platform
Apart from providing better quality results to its users, Presearch claims that it protects internet users privacy because it does NOT track internet users browsing habits or storing their your searches, and web search queries are handled by a decentralized network of node servers processed as anonymized queries. According to Presearch Vision White Paper, developing a decentralised Search engine architecture can be quite challenging and extra infrastructures measures are necessary including, the prevention of malicious actors of stealing user information or returning dangerous and unwanted content to the search engine users and achieving fast (hundreds of milliseconds) response times across a massively distributed network of servers.
An interesting technical analysis about Presearch's privacy orientation can be found by [PierreL] in his article Is Presearch respectful of your privacy?
The Presearch Rewarding System
It was quite obvious for the Presearch Team, that providing just a robust privacy-oriented decentralised web search engine isn't enough in order to establish Presearch in this highly competitive search engine market not only against Google but also against the already establish Microsoft's Bing, Yahoo! and even DuckDuckGo. Therefore, in order to become widely attractive to internet users and not just to that market-limited privacy-concerned and alternative internet users, Presearch developed a sophisticated blockchain rewarding system, providing rewards to its community members in the form of a native cryptocurrency token ($PRE) through four rewarding channels such as the Use of Presearch as the designated Search Engine for obtaining authentic web results, an Affiliate Program, the Presearch Staking Program and the Decentralised Node Operations Program.
Fraud and Abuse Prevention
Rewarding community members with rewards even on the form of a cryptocurrency can be risky and might create dangers in the sustainability of the project. Therefore, as it is described in the Terms & Conditions of the platform and for the protection of the project and its community members from any kind of intentional fraud and abuse from users who might try to earn an advantage by running automated programs or bots designed to perform automatic web searches, doing frequent non-normal searches abusing the search engine as a faucet or creating multiple referred accounts, Presearch developed a sophisticated automatic anti-abuse system that analyzes the search behavior of the community members on an ongoing basis assigning them a specific PRE Level between 0 and 10 according to the following table that affects the accumulation of the rewards and the ability to withdraw them from the system.
Yet, from a specific point of view, that particular anti-abuse automatic system that supervises the behavior of the users in the platform even in order to secure the fair use of the web search engine, can be considered as an intrusion to user's privacy according to US/EU online privacy and data protection directives such as the GDPR.
The Presearch Token ($PRE)
Just like in every modern blockchain-based project, Presearch has developed its own native token, the Presearch Token ($PRE) which is is an ERC20 Token built on the Ethereum blockchain with a current circulation supply of 396,578,435 out of 500,000,000 tokens. As it was described above, it is being primarily used as an incentive to Presearch community members for performing authentic web searches, operating a decentralised node and referring other internet users to use the Presearch search engine increasing the volume of Presearch community. In the future, it will be further used as a value exchange token between the participants of the advertising marketplace at the same way that $BAT operates on the Brave ecosystem.
Rewarding the use of Presearch Web Search Engine
Currently, Presearch provides 0.12 PRE as a reward for every authentic web search, limiting however the rewards in only the first 32 searches per day. That equals with a maximum reward of 32 x 0.12 PRE = 3.84 PRE per day. Yet, the PRE search rewards and search limits aren't stable and fluctuate according to company's strategic planning. For example before reaching the milestone of 1 million users the search reward was 0.25 PRE per search and in its medium blog of Feb 2020, it is stated that each user could earn from between 0.25 to 0.5 PRE per search, up to 8 PRE tokens every 24 hours. [https://presearch.medium.com/how-do-rewards-work-73a545ceae60]
In order to protect the project from significant Ethereum Gas costs generated by processing numerous small transactions, Presearch has placed a minimum withdrawal threshold of 1,000 eligible tokens, executed every. That means that the users need 1000/3.84= 260.4 days executing 32 eligible Presearch searches daily in order to reach the minimum withdrawal threshold.
Affiliate program
Presearch referral program provides an extra way of earning the PRE token as a referral incentive of 25 PRE per successful referred registration when referred users remain active for 30 days and earn a minimum of 50 PRE tokens while using the platform.
Sign-up with my referral link and get 25 PRE tokens as a bonus.
Presearch Keyword Staking Program - A New Advertising Model
In addition to offering to community members a great web search experience, Presearch has developed an innovative way of rewarding Presearch community users in The Presearch Keyword Staking Program which has many similarities with Google's Adwords program. In fact, the Presearch Keyword Staking Program enables token holders to commit or ‘stake’ their PRE tokens against specific words for example "Publisher" and multi-word terms such as "Mother's Day Kisses" and is dedicated to create significant value for marketers who would like to reach Presearch users. Advertisers including everyday users can stake their PRE to a keyword, and whichever advertiser stakes the most tokens will have its ads displayed when a user searches on the term selected.
According to Presearch Vision White Paper, Publish0x.com is among its early keyword staking adopters and promoters.
Decentralized Platform powered by the community
Finally, Presearch offers a new search engine decentralised experience by providing the opportunity to Presearch members to run Presearch node servers on their machines executing an operation similar to blockchain mining after being compensated with PRE tokens for the value of the work and capacity they provide to the network. Presearch nodes can be installed on any computer or server and provide the computing resources to power the Presearch Engine. According to Presearch Vision White Paper, currently, there are at least seven different kinds of operations that a node can perform such as:
1) Registering (all nodes). Registering with a Node Gateway, which can then route queries to the node if it passes health and security validation.
2) Validating (all nodes). Coordinating with a Node Validator to ensure that each node is only running trusted Presearch software (to avoid security issues from potential bad actors).
3) Coordinating. Processing and distributing queries sent by Node Gateways. This may require routing to multiple serving nodes and aggregating the results.
4) Federating. Proxying other data sources and returning their data as part of search results.
5) Serving. Hosting portions of the search index used to process queries.
6) Crawling. Crawling websites to build out search indices.
7) Indexing. Writing federated or crawled data to search indexes to be served by serving nodes.
In summary, Presearch provides a well organised modern and independent privacy-oriented search engine which can be considered as a serious alternative to Google web search dominance.
Disclaimer: All information found on this article is for informational purposes only. I do not provide any personal investment advice so please make your own research before proceeding to any investment/trading actions
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