Presearch's Colin Pape on using Google's own channels to challenge it

Ashton Addison: What is Presearch, and how does it work?▶ 00:20

Colin Pape: We're building a decentralized search engine. It's a community-driven project, so it's not venture capital backed and has no ties to Silicon Valley. We're trying to build a search engine that is by the people, for the people. It lets them search privately and participate in the ecosystem more actively than as just a user. We reward people with Presearch tokens when they run searches, and user nodes power the infrastructure. We have a testnet running with about 12,000 user nodes, and the mainnet goes live a little later this year. Those infrastructure providers are rewarded with tokens too. On the demand side, we have a platform called keyword staking. A traditional ad platform is denominated in fiat and uses auction-based cost per click. Here, for the foreseeable future, there's essentially no cost per click. You choose a keyword and stake your tokens to it, and whoever stakes the most has their ad displayed. If you cancel your ad, the tokens are returned to your account, so there's really no actual cost. Search is critical to the future and freedom of the internet, and right now we have massive centralization. Ninety-two percent of searches run through Google, and the second-biggest search engine is basically YouTube, another Google property.

Ashton: How does a decentralized engine differ from Google or DuckDuckGo?▶ 03:43

Colin: Right now, you could think of Presearch as almost a meta search engine. It lets us leverage existing indexes while we build our own on top of them to replace them. One of the biggest challenges in search is the long tail. Maybe half of queries are the most common million searches, and those are fairly easy to build an index around. The other 50% of traffic is totally obscure keywords, and in quite a few cases it's stuff that has never been searched before. If you don't have quality answers for every query, people quickly turn away and end up back at Google or DuckDuckGo, which is basically a skin on Bing. Only two or three search engines in the world have built their own entire index: Google, Bing and, out of Russia, Yandex. The DuckDuckGos and StartPages leverage those indexes because it's such a massive challenge. So we're developing infrastructure that lets user nodes run all over the world. They protect the user's privacy and let us decentralize our infrastructure and pay for it in a crypto token. We're trying to minimize our fiat outlays so we can become a full DAO with no ties to the traditional financial world. Right now those nodes hit other data sources, and in the process we start building our own index. Over time we layer more jobs onto this infrastructure, and that makes us more independent.

Ashton: Presearch is being added as a default search option on Android in Europe. What does that mean for the project?▶ 08:32

Colin: It's a really big win for the project, and for blockchain in general from a mass adoption standpoint. There are something like 150 to 200 million Android installs in Europe each year. Before this, you generally just got Google by default. That was a large part of their go-to-market strategy: getting lock-in across platforms like Gmail and YouTube. The EU has been focused on breaking up big tech's monopoly on people's attention and software. After a lawsuit in 2018, it forced Google to implement a search choice screen. When it first launched, it was pay-for-play and super expensive, and the unit economics didn't justify participating for us or really anybody. Then another round of legal action forced them to remove the cost. One of our team members, Alex, took the lead on applying. We were approved in July, and it went live on September 1st. Now anybody in Europe installing a new Android device or updating gets this search choice screen, and Presearch is one of the options. I think we were one of the only ones to make it into every single country, because they do it country by country. It's already been spiking our new users. We've had about five times our daily new users over the past week since it went live.

Ashton: What will it take for decentralized search to overtake Google?▶ 11:40

Colin: Google has so much lock-in. They've locked people in with Google accounts and integrated Google into so many devices and pieces of software. But we're releasing a new UI on our testnet next Wednesday, and we feel it's finally competitive with Google. It's really responsive and the results are great. For some reason Google still doesn't have dark mode, which is a big opportunity. I think their Achilles heel is that the huge revenue driver for that company is still basic Google Ads, a product they launched in the early 2000s that makes over a hundred billion dollars a year. They have to protect that because it funds everything else. As a public company, they have to maximize those ad units to satisfy shareholders, so they've stuffed their pages with as many advertising-driven keywords as possible. At some point people don't find those results as helpful. So it's largely about getting in front of people on the devices they use. We've launched an Android app and a home screen widget for Android users, and we have an iOS app. We're working on a desktop browser, but for now we use extensions to integrate with Chrome, Brave and Firefox. We can also incentivize people with tokens and be flexible with the UI. Our whole model since the beginning has been: how do we leverage big tech against itself? The Android search choice is exactly that. They've built these channels, and we can plug into them far more easily than building from scratch. It can seem unrealistic to displace a trillion-dollar company, but I can see a way it happens, maybe more quickly than people think.

Ashton: What's coming for Presearch for the rest of 2021?▶ 16:40

Colin: First, the new search UI. It's a whole other paradigm in responsiveness, load speed and overall look and feel, and it's coming really soon. We recently started supporting Raspberry Pi for testnet nodes, so we're working on a hardware device. A lot of people don't know that yet, but a Presearch node is coming out, and there's an interesting integration with NFTs as well. On the back end, we've totally revamped our anti-abuse system to stop people from gaming the system to earn tokens, and we're implementing a new web3 withdrawal system. Once those are in place, we start transitioning live traffic. We currently have more than a million searches a day and 2.3 million registered users. Right now that traffic runs on the same software but is hosted centrally in data centers. We'll move it onto the user nodes, and then we're in real go-to-market mode. We'll also look at the keyword staking platform. There are many improvements to make on the ad UI side, so we can create engaging, unobtrusive ads that people actually find beneficial. Beyond that, there's more decentralization: more decentralized governance, and more blockchain in places where we currently use centralized technology.