With all the hallelujah around new ATH for BTC and the jump-up for the HIVE and LEO tokens, I won't bore you with those ones. Time to praise some other project and token. One that found a way to a kinda coronavirus distribution mechanism combined with an inbuild circular economy. I know of two projects combining both: Brave and Presearch. It's the later I'll talk about in the remainder of this article.
The following topics I'll address for you:
- Presearch: Intro and Brief Overview
- My Experiences with Presearch
- Presearch Nodes: Earn while Contributing to the Network
- Keyword Staking: Next Generation Advertisement model
- Roadmap 2021: Gigantic Leap Forward
- Presearch versus Brave Search
- Getting Started
- Useful Links
- Hivesearcher + Presearch?
Presearch: Intro and Brief Overview
Some of you may be familiar with Presearch already. Others may not. Hence in a few sentences what Presearch is about. It's a search engine. Unlike Google and the other known search engines, Presearch is set up as a decentralised service and rewards the user with PRE tokens. Every search with Presearch gives results into adding a small number of tokens into the users Presearch wallet. As with any search engine, an advertisement feature is available. User can 'rent' keywords and pay for them with PRE tokens. It's not really renting as well as it is not really paying for but will come back to that later.
In case you like to dive into Presearch, watch this 45-minute video. Much of what I talk about in this article will be explained by the CEO of the Presearch developers team.
Presearch Demo & Project Update (45min)
My Experiences with Presearch
More than a year ago, I started using Presearch as my default search tool. With a browser plugin, it's super simple to operate. Just enter the search words in the browsers address bar, and the plugin makes sure Presearch is used.
When I started using Presearch, it was not that good in search results and it was quite slow. But much has been improved since then. By now, I'm quite pleased with the search results and the speed of the service. A Google search may still be a tat quicker, but Presearch is quick enough for me. When using Presearch I feel I contribute to a great project, whilst moving away from companies that are becoming way too large and powerful. Am not saying I never use Google search anymore, but am in the process of re-evaluating the current state of affairs and slowly adjusting my own behaviours to support the future I like to live in: A world without large corporates of any kind. In order to do so, I feel the need to shift towards making use of services offered by small centralised companies as well as making use of services having decentralisation and open source at heart.
I must admit since I accidentally discovered the search rewards dropped from 0,25 PRE to about 0,12 PRE per search and subsequently tried to identify the reason for this adjustment, I hardly knew anything about the project and its capabilities. Now I know a lot more after hours of searching, reading and digesting.
The reward adjustments were made sometime last week of February (22nd to be exact) together with the move of the Presearch service from the Beta phase into the first official release: 1.0.
The Presearch team wrote in one of its Medium articles:
This marks the beginning of a new phase where search rewards are no longer pegged at a fixed rate of 0.25 PRE per search and will be variable-rate, based on system-wide inputs such as a number of searches, advertising revenue, node operator rewards and other factors.
Starting Monday, reward rates will now be automatically adjusted each day to balance the overall tokenomics of the Presearch platform on an ongoing basis.
I suppose this explains the why of the reward variations in my reward history, ranging from 0,10 to 0,13 PRE per search. But who cares :) I'm a happy Presearch user and LOVE what they introduced with version 1.0 .... namely: Search Nodes!
Presearch Nodes: Earn while Contributing to the Network
These Presearch Nodes are the cornerstone of Presearch, making the search engine decentralised by nature. In the beta phase, the search node concept was already introduced. Now it is made official, including a reward mechanism for the node operator.
The beautiful thing here: Anybody can run a node!
I didn't download one yet but intend to do so. Soon! Likely just to check it out, not to run it 24x7 since I don't have the right setup for such a thing. Am just surrounded by a few laptops I use every day, for my employee work, for my crypto work, and for my personal stuff. Also, I like my house to be quiet: Fans shall be at rest, most of the time :) But who knows? When the Presearch Node keeps my laptop fans at rest, I may run a node 24x7.
Presearch Node software can be installed by anyone on their computer or excess server capacity to help power the new Presearch decentralized search engine. By running node software, operators help crawl the web for the information needed to answer user search queries.
In exchange for providing computing resources, operators who stake PRE tokens can earn PRE rewards to offset the cost of hosting and provide an incentive for more nodes to join the network and provide high-quality, reliable service.
Nodes run in a software environment called Docker that is supported by all major operating systems and server platforms. To install a node, you’ll first register for an operator code that you enter when you launch your node.
Read About
Keyword Staking: Next Generation Advertisement model
Maybe of lesser interest to most of you, is the advertisement component of Presearch. It's relevant for those who run their own website and like to make use of the Presearch ad-model to increase traffic.
As mentioned already, the model is different from what we know from all the social and search platform. While with eg Google we need to spend hard dollars for every click, with Presearch we simply need to own some hard PRE tokens and stake them.
Staking is different from spending money. It is more like a savings account for our PRE tokens which we lock for some time. Any keyword can be staked. Those of us locking in the most PRE tokens to a specific keyword will get its ad displayed while the PRE tokens are kept in our wallets. When you are done with advertising your website, you can unlock your PRE and do whatever with them you like.
This is an absolute killer implementation of advertisement in my honest opinion.
Note: Presearch does plan to add a cost model for a displayed ad, but this will not become available before June'21. Coming months, it's still for free.
Presearch Keyword Staking
Read About
Roadmap 2021: Gigantic Leap Forward
The roadmap of 2021 includes some really interesting features.
for Users
- User-2-User token transfer
- Ad-free User Experience
for Advertisers
- Inverse Keyword Staking: Reduction of traffic to the website for staked keywords
- Keyword Staking Explorer / Analytics
- Advanced Advertisement models combining CPM (Cost per Million) and CPC (Cost per Click)
for Node Operator
- Optimisations in Search Node architecture
Presearch versus Brave Search
For a long time, I thought Presearch and Brave should join hands. The combination seemed to me the best we can get to connect crypto projects with the mass. Both projects distribute usage rewards the most of all tokens around, to millions and millions of users, every single day. But recently, Brave decided to make an acquisition (Cliqz) in the space of search engines and will launch its own.
Drn! Why?*
Though the match I liked to have seen converted into a marriage is not happening, I'm not too negative about this. I do see the opportunity for Presearch not to be with Brave.
Not on the official roadmap for Presearch, the team plans to create its own browser at some point in time. They already have one for the smartphone. Now they plan one for the desktop/laptop as well. This will result in healthy competition in the space of decentralised browsing and searching.
A shame though it happened now since it would've been better to join hands to fight against the Googles of this world. Anyway, the free world is like it is: Freedom of choice.
Not sure if it's true, but the founder and CEO of Presearch claims, the search engine bought by Brave is a centralised implementation. Though Presearch was looking into buying the same company, it decided not to do so because of that fact, it was not decentralised enough. That in itself gives me confidence the Presearch team has its heart in the right place.
Presearch seems to have good cards (maybe even the best cards of all players in this field) to become the standard!
From Presearch CEO at his Reddit blog (source):
We spoke with the CEO of Cliqz that they acquired when word came that it would be shut down to see if it was something that could accelerate our development.
We discussed decentralization, nodes, etc., and they made it clear that the way it was architected was really not compatible with that vision.
The results were decent for 'head' queries - ex. your top 100k searches, but pretty weak for long-tail searches, as is common for search engines. Honestly, it's a massive challenge, and you need tremendous resources to make the model work from a tech standpoint.
The problem is that if your results aren't good for long-tail (which account for 50%+ of search queries), people will slowly migrate back to Google or Bing-powered engines as they are the ones that do both well.
That's why we're leveraging their results to cover the long tail and then building our own head / short tail results index on top.
Our CTO is one of the world's leading experts on open source search, and this model was his brainchild. Our early advisor, Rich Skrenta, who was the founder of search engine Blekko (who raised $70m to build a search engine), told me straight up that we'd be crazy to try to build an independent long-tail index. His exact words 'it is crushingly hard'.
Getting Started
To get your first experiences with Presearch, head over to its main page: https://www.presearch.org/ and start searching. It is as simple as that :)
To get a better user experience, download the browser plugin and tell it to set Presearch as the default search engine. When done so, you can search in exact same ways as you did with Google, like entering your search words into the address bar of your browser. Super easy!
In case you like to configure your browsers start page to be the Presearch one, use the following:
Useful Links
Below are all 'click me' links as I've been using already above.
- Presearch Company Website
- Presearch Search Website
- Presearch at Medium
- Presearch at Reddit
- Presearch at YT incl weekly project updates
- Who Uses Presearch
- Presearch FAQ (some information is slightly outdated)
- Presearch Support Website
- Presearch Market at CoinGecko (incl all the exchanges PRE tokens can be traded)
- Presearch at Ethereum (PRE tokens can be traded at Uniswap)
Hivesearcher + Presearch?
I think this paragraph title is self-explanatory. Maybe the usage of the search for content on our HIVE chain is still used on a tiny scale, but I opt for the inclusion of Hivesearcher in all the blogging UIs around the HIVE chain! We shall promote the concept of search. The content we create shall not be lost. Our community will become stronger when we start linking other posts in our own articles. How cool would it be when we end up receiving rewards for searches we execute on our HIVE chain?
all images by edje unless stated otherwise
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