Presearch is a decentralized search engine that uses a community-based process to provide more accurate search results. The goal of Presearch is to disrupt Google and their centralized, controlling ways. Google has a tremendous influence on the way we access information. They control 77% of all search results. They act as gatekeepers, and Google can suppress search results, blacklist websites, and take away ad revenue.
Presearch wants to change that. Presearch is a ground up, community movement, similar to Wikipedia. Human curation is an important strategy that is combined with scalable machine learning approaches. This curation and overall development of the platform is incentivized with PRE (Presearch Token) exchangeable tokens that reward participants’ efforts
The Presearch startup, registered in the US, managed to raise over $16 000 000 during the duration of their crowdsale.
Presearch uses tokens to incentivize members of its community. Community members are rewarded for their usage, contributions to, and promotion of the platform. Ultimately, the goal is a decentralized search process with key features like: Open and transparent ranking factors. Google keeps its search rankings and algorithm a closely-guarded secret. Presearch aims to make its ranking factors open and transparent, which gives content creators a level playing field. A community-driven decision-making process that ensures the best content is surfaced and displayed.
Presearch will dedicate its time, energy and resources to get community consensus model right develop a framework for active participation in the decision-making and coding of their open search engine. Presearch will leverage its PST token (ERC20 Ethereum based token) to reward and incentivize the community to use, promote and contribute to the platform, enabling members to benefit by using the system and to be rewarded for engaging with Sponsors, rather than being a product that is monetized by the search engine.
Tokens will be given to early adopters to reward usage and promotion of the platform. In addition, token holders can vote on decisions and suggest new projects for the dev team. Developers – whether they’re part of the core team or independent contributors – will then receive tokens for contributing to the project. Tokens can also be used by advertisers. Advertisers can purchase targeted, non-intrusive keyword sponsorships with Presearch Tokens.
The project is still in a beta phase even more than a year after it ICO. Furthermore, while it offers some unique and interesting features, it would be hard for it to grab a market share from search engine giants like Google, Yahoo, Bing and DuckDuckGo. Also, it doesn’t have quite a strong proposition and its native token essentially acts as a security, which may warrant a ban in some countries.
Overall, Presearch is definitely an interesting project and a lot of things about it check out. However, it may or may not manage to establish itself in the competitive sector of search engines which is dominated by centralized competitors.
