How Presearch is Building a Decentralized Search Engine

Over the last decade, Google has monopolized the world of search. They dominate nearly 75% of the space and are leagues above competition.

Google now processes over 40,000 search queries every second on average (visualize them here), which translates to over 3.5 billion searches per day and 1.2 trillion searches per year worldwide.

The gatekeeper of search has tremendous influence. They influence trillions upon trillions of dollars in choices and spending. They shape public biases and perceptions. They connect the world.

At a high level, it is dangerous to entrust these responsibilities to a single, centralized entity that can be corrupted or manipulated. The world needs a fair and transparent search engine to avoid biases and protect the truth.

Presearch is an open, decentralized search engine that rewards community members with Presearch Tokens for their usage, contribution to, and promotion of the platform.

Their mission is to “provide Internet users with an alternative to the search hegemony that dictates where most of us learn, engage and spend our valuable attention and resources.”

Their team recognizes that Presearch is a highly ambitious project. “Google is one of the best companies in the world, and #1 on the Internet. Improving on their results, experience, and integrations will be no small feat — many even say it’s impossible.”

But they are optimistic.

However, we believe that collectively the community can creatively and elegantly fulfill its own search needs from the ground up and create an amazing and open search engine that is aligned with the interests of humanity, not just one company.

In their mind, it comes down to execution, as decentralized networks will become an inevitable reality in the next 5 years.

We are optimistic and believe that if we execute the Presearch vision and strategy, we will provide the world with a next generation search engine that is driven and controlled by the community, and which will provide a blockchain-based, decentralized and open source alternative to the closed, corporate search engines that exist today.

Distributed-powered search has a number of advantages over centralized systems:

• Open and transparent ranking factors enable content creators to access a level playing field, and users the choice of which data sources to utilize
• Community-driven decision-making process ensures that everyone’s interests are aligned, and the best content is surfaced and displayed
• Ability to vote on and fund dev projects provides ability to influence and improve the platform, and earn tokens for contributing

Presearch has an innovative go-to-market strategy to target the most frequent searchers — web workers — and gain early adoption, on our way to releasing future versions of the open source platform that will utilize a blockchain-based index, curated by the community.

They are issuing a token offering where they will raise funds to power their product. Their team is a mix of serial entrepreneurs and blockchain technlogists who are optimistic about the future of decentralization. They are taking a very realistic approach to development.

This model will enable tens of thousands of smart people to participate in the creation of an open search engine that is built explicitly to serve the needs of the community. The cost to run a full index of the web is prohibitively large. If the index is decentralized, however, and distributed in a way that utilizes the computing resources shared by potentially millions of people (in exchange for PRE tokens), this cost can be mitigated significantly.We are exploring a model that will enable Members running a Presearch browser extension (and potentially a standalone browser) to act as web crawling and indexing nodes that would build the Presearch index as they surf the web. This would enable Presearch to get around one of the most difficult crawling challenges; getting blocked by webmasters. Members running nodes will earn PRE Tokens in exchange for utilizing their computers and internet connections for Presearch.

While a daunting challenge, their team and community is certainly up for it. They have even attracted talents such as Anthony Di Loro, one of the Co-Founders of Ethereum, to serve as advisors.

It will be interesting to see how upstarts like Presearch can gain traction leveraging state of the art technologies and going up against big conglomerates like Google and Facebook.

Thanks for reading!

How Presearch is Building a Decentralized Search Engine was originally published in Hacker Noon on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.