Decentralized search engine: Presearch

May 19th, 2022

If you follow the financial news regularly, you should be familiar with Google's frequent falloff in the EU. Google is often targeted by regulation for collecting user information and its monopoly position in the search engine market, and paying fines has become a "due diligence" for Google and other Internet giants operating in Europe. Type "Google" and "fines" into the search engine and you will see a series of news stories.

One of the most famous enforcement incidents took place in 2017. On June 27 of that year, the European Commission announced that Internet giant Google had been fined 2.42 billion euros for violations of EU competition regulations. A statement issued by the European Commission that day noted that Google entered the shopping comparison market and used its dominant position in the online search space to manipulate search results and unfairly direct customers to its own shopping services.

This event happened to step in the middle of the introduction and implementation of the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation). The regulation, introduced on April 14, 2016 and officially put into effect on May 25, 2018, is open to all companies that collect, process, store, and manage personal data of EU citizens, limiting the authority of these companies to collect and process users' personal information and aiming to return the ultimate control of personal information to the users themselves.

But has the Internet giant turned out to be a good boy after GDPR was officially put into effect? In March of the following year alone, the EU antitrust authorities issued another hefty €1.49 billion fine to Google for abusing its dominant market position by imposing numerous restrictive clauses in contracts with third-party websites to prevent Google's competitors from publishing search ads on those sites.

Thus, in the era of Web 2.0 and the centralized logic of products, the potential threat posed by individuals and centralized entities has made governments sit up and take notice, despite the apparent lack of conflict between the latter. As the first attempt of "globalization", the colonial expansion in the age of navigation, the technology and ideas imported from the "center of European civilization" transformed the once barren old world, but at the cost of colonizing and semi-colonizing most of the world. In this process, we know Columbus, Magellan and Da Gama as adventurous "entrepreneurs", while the government only played the role of sponsor.

In the 1990s, during the second wave of globalization after the collapse of the Soviet Union, it was these international companies that acted as pioneers. It is only near the end of the first two decades of the 21st century that we hear the voice of "counter-globalization" after a long time. On the one hand, there is populism and non-ideological confrontation between countries; on the other hand, within countries and regions, there are restrictions imposed by governments and regulators on the former pioneers of globalization, both in terms of fine-grained management and in terms of the potential threat that centralized entities such as Google pose to people and governments.

There are many examples of this, including Vice News' interpretation of Facebook's name change to Meta a few days ago, arguing that a company that is still unable to control itself in the Web 2.0 era will only increase its evil in the Web 3.0 era. Therefore, we also see the demand for decentralized storage, computing, etc. In particular, some time ago, the chain of news offline really makes people think about the reality of "decentralization" what is the meaning. But for the ordinary user's daily life, through the search engine to obtain information is more high-frequency just need.

Presearch a small step, Web3.0 a big step

Presearch is an open, decentralized search engine that rewards community members $PRE for using, contributing and promoting the platform. Google controls 77% of the search market, influences trillions of dollars in spending, shapes opinions, and effectively plays the role of the Internet's primary portal. At a time when the concept of Web 3.0 is hot, an open, community-driven search engine is essential.

The project, Presearch, has been conceptualized and operated since the last cryptocurrency bull market (2017). After the cryptocurrency market experienced a severe downturn in 2018, almost every project suffered financial setbacks and many failed completely. presearch weathered the storm.

Presearch protects user privacy and offers cryptocurrency rewards through the Presearch.org website, browser extensions, and mobile apps (both iOS and Android versions are now live). presearch's ecosystem is centered around PRE passes, which are used to reward community members who use, contribute to, and promote the Presearch platform. PRE passes are also used to drive the keyword pledge advertising system. Users who pledge the most PRE passes under certain conditions will have their ads displayed on the platform. More than 52 million $PRE assets have been pledged so far.

Presearch's goal is to challenge Google and allow people to search for information on the Internet in a more democratic way. To solve Google's problems, alternative search engines like DuckDuckGo have emerged in the market to provide users with more privacy protection, but they still operate on a centralized basis.

A decentralized search engine is a blockchain-based solution that is designed to solve the problem of centralized search engines. Instead of collecting people's data without their permission (or forcing them to agree to use the solution), decentralized search engines protect the privacy of their users. By using blockchain technology, decentralized search engines can provide a transparent, censorship-resistant experience for users, and anyone can use the solution without any restrictions.

Another great feature of the decentralized search solution is the lack of middlemen, which means advertisers can get more value. presearch allows advertisers to pledge $PRE passes to display their ads in search results without paying extra for certain keywords. Whether a business can win the ad auction depends on the amount of $PRE it pledges.

As part of an open source, community-driven project, Presearch also offers a transparent service where users can contribute additional data layers through a community pack to get more accurate results. Presearch, a decentralized search engine solution, rewards users for using the search engine to find information on the web.

Route Map

November 11, 2021 - Presearch, the decentralized search engine, has integrated with OpenSea to build NFT search into its platform. Presearch founder Colin Pape says Presearch wants to be "the Google of the Web3 decentralization era. "Presearch's integration with OpenSea, the world's largest NFT marketplace, is designed to simplify the way users search for NFT. presearch claims to be the first search engine to offer this feature. Users will search for the names of NFT projects and get top-ranked results from OpenSea. The blockchain-based Presearch has 2.7 million registered users who receive PRE tokens each time they perform a search. Advertisers can also pledge PRE for specific search terms, and when a user searches for that term, the advertiser with the most pledged tokens will appear.

Starting September 1, 2021, the decentralized search engine Presearch will be the default search engine for new Android devices sold in Europe, a move that could undermine Google's dominance of the search engine market. presearch is backed by a community of node operators who process user search requests and are rewarded through ethereum-based PRE tokens.

2021 On May 12, Presearch released its mainnet roadmap to launch the Presearch mainnet later in 2021 (which has been delayed to Q1 2022). The specific sequence of the roadmap is: mobile browser, Web3 withdrawals, replacement of rewards verification system, search rewards 2.0, token bridge, performance-based smart node routing, start of testing production traffic on user nodes, automatic search engine scaling, gateway for geographic distribution, launch of Presearch.com domain, integration of engine into Presearch.com and UI simplification, the migration of user nodes to the main network, and official launch of the main network.