Presearch mainnet goes live with 65,000 user-run nodes, says founder Colin Pape

Ashton Addison: What is the vision for Presearch?▶ 00:22

Colin Pape: The vision for Presearch is a decentralized search engine driven by the community, by the people for the people, using open source technology. It lets the community play an active role both in the information that is accessed through the search engine and in the economic value of search, which is massive. Google brings in $100 billion a year in revenue through a fairly simple ad platform. We're looking at how to funnel that value back into an alternative, parallel economy, which is what many of us in crypto are trying to build.

Ashton: Why does search matter so much, and where does Presearch fit in?▶ 02:20

Colin: I've been around the internet for quite a while, and I remember the early days, when people were excited about communicating directly and freely and accessing all these different channels without interference. Somewhere along the way we ended up back in a walled garden, where a handful of big tech players have all the network effects. They've steered us in a direction I think runs counter to the ethos of the early internet. They seem to be all about extracting as much value as possible from users and controlling what information they see. In some cases they support biases or agendas that users aren't aware of, or wouldn't support if they were. If we can put that power back in the hands of the people using the platform, and let them look under the hood and take part in governance, we think that's the public utility the internet needs and deserves. The alternative is a single company with 92 percent market share and interests totally different from its users'.

Ashton: What does the mainnet launch mean for the future of Presearch?▶ 04:41

Colin: We launched a testnet toward the end of 2020. People install software on a computer or a server, including virtual servers in data centers around the world. That makes the machine's processing, storage or bandwidth available to the network. We can allocate tasks to it and reward the people running those nodes with the Presearch token. Regular search engines have massive data centers and extreme control over every aspect of the process. We now have over 65,000 user nodes contributed to the network, which is quite impressive, and it gives us a foundation with almost no ties to the legacy financial and technical systems. Right now we mostly use the nodes to access information from multiple sources on the internet: different search engines, databases and APIs. With the infrastructure in place, we can take the next step: running decentralized crawlers, indexing, searching indexes, and everything else an independent open source search engine needs. We have a great CTO, Trey Granger, who is very involved in the open source search community and has had a vision for how this could be done.

Ashton: Is this a revolution for search, and will people actually switch?▶ 09:11

Colin: It really is a whole different paradigm. The beauty of search is that people do it so frequently that it's possible to build a habit around a different search engine. With a lot of interesting web3 projects, you might use them so rarely that it's tough to switch over. With search, people do it multiple times a day. You can install a private browser or search experience on your mobile device, or use browser extensions. Some people have used Presearch as their primary search engine since 2018. I don't use Google anymore. I use Presearch and multiple search engines within it, for example for Etherscan lookups or for searching the CRM system for my other business. We've grown to over a million users a month and 3.8 million registered users.

Ashton: Can people earn tokens just by searching, without running a node?▶ 11:58

Colin: Yes, and that's been a key driver of growth and stickiness. People feel they're being valued, and the tokens they collect add up over time. There are also rewards for referring people. Everybody has a link to share, and if people join through it, they earn Presearch tokens too. We're trying to decentralize that value ecosystem. Right now hundreds of billions of dollars funnel into Mountain View, California. Here it's very distributed, and the nodes are all over the world, even in places you wouldn't expect. The organization itself can stay quite small while we empower community members to keep making Presearch better. It's kind of like the Bitcoin of search; that's how we're thinking of it.

Ashton: How does Presearch become the default way people search?▶ 14:38

Colin: The search space is massive and super centralized. Google has more than 92 percent market share. DuckDuckGo has come up over the past few years, but they seem to be on a bit of a downtrend after some recent revelations that they may not be so aligned with their users. We've been picking up a lot of users, which is great. We have a path to appeal to people who share our values, are interested in crypto and are power users looking to customize their search. That alone is a big opportunity. Over time we're looking at getting installed as a default search engine, or striking distribution deals with up-and-coming services, including new web3 apps and wallets. On the legacy side, a legal ruling in the EU forced Google to stop setting itself as the default every time someone installs Chrome or Android. Users now get a search choice screen where they have to choose actively. We applied and were included, so for all EU Android and Chrome users, Presearch is one of the options they can select just as easily as Google. We've been picking up users who are curious about private search or blockchain but don't know Presearch per se.

Ashton: How can readers try Presearch and get involved with nodes?▶ 17:42

Colin: We just switched to presearch.com, the new domain for the project. We think of the .com as representing the community. You can register for an account using the link in the top right corner. The menu there also lets you explore the advertising platform, which uses something called keyword staking. If you want to join the decentralized infrastructure movement and run a Presearch node, you can go into the nodes section.