The Internet connects more than half of humanity and is reshaping industry, society and government at an unprecedented pace.
While most users are happy with the current state of the Internet due to the proliferation of ‘free’ services that enable them to research, share, transact and communicate, just a handful of these services are responsible for the vast majority of usage.
Never before have so few organizations controlled the information flow for so many people.
While this is problematic, at least with services like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter users know they are dealing in a walled garden and do not expect impartiality and neutrality in their experience.
However, in the case of Google, due to their origin as an academic project, friendly branding, and ‘don’t be evil’ mantra, users have been lead to believe that Google is a neutral resource that simply guides them to the most appropriate answers that are chosen automatically by a genius algorithm. They expect honest answers and have a hard time believing that Google’s results could be self-serving or worse, detrimental to the searcher.
As Google has become a multi-billion dollar business that answers to Wall Street, their ethos seems to have shifted from the early days people remember them by. They have become known for promoting their own properties at the expense of alternatives , appropriating others’ info and operating in secrecy , all of which is blamed on ‘the algorithm’. The reality is that they manually manipulate results while hiding behind their algorithm and justifying all changes as being ‘best for the user’. It’s not an ideal environment.
Search is the gateway to the web. The world deserves an alternative search engine that is open, transparent, and that involves the community in product development, consensus and quality control.
Presearch is building this open, decentralized search engine. We clearly set the ground rules and user expectations up front, and will never deviate from our community constitution.
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.
In the beta release, which is more of a search tool than a search engine, the user is able to choose which engine they search from the Presearch interface. Google is the default option, minimizing switching costs for the majority of users who already use Google. Users are exposed to alternative engines, including DuckDuckGo, social search engines, domain WHOIS engines and more.
Presearch funds operations through a transparent, unobtrusive advertising system that enables advertisers to bid on keywords and sponsor results. In version one, relevant ads are displayed within the search field auto-suggest results. Ads are purchased using PREs via auction, driving usage within the ecosystem.