New decentralized community based search engine PreSearch.org launched as Alternative to the Google Monopoly

international | sci-tech | news report Saturday March 13, 2021 01:44 by 1 of indy

A new search engine that hopefully threatens Google's grip on Internet searches

Search engines have come to dominate our lives and Google which is by far the best known has by far the largest marketshare estimated to be anything from 70% to 90%. These search engines have become powerful tools for the corporations owning them as it gives them immense power to shape peoples lives since they control the algorithm controlling what you see when you search the news, check facts or try to search for information which they exclude from the search results because it does not suit their agenda. They also know incredible amounts about their users from their preferences, political leanings, lifestyles, ailments, age, location holiday preferences and practically every other aspects of them. It is time we took our privacy back and with the launch of a new decentralized and community based search engine called PreSearch.org there is now a chance that the tide is turning.

There are many organisations publishing estimates of the market share of the different search engines and they all consistently estimate that Google has approximately anywhere from 70 to 90% market share with Microsoft's Bing search engine coming in at somewhere between 3% and 12%. However the problem with this is not until you get down to about 10th place in the list with the search engine DuckDuckGo.com at about 0.5% share that you get to a search engine you can trust to some degree with your privacy and they won't sell it or spy on you.

Search engines are important because they affect everyone who accesses the Internet and that is quickly becoming almost everyone on Earth. They have two key forms of power and they are in shaping what you see and hear by way of the search results they return to you and secondly they can learn an incredible amount about you through the searches you make. Search engines and especially Google, because it has such an overwhelming monopoly, have undreamt of power to shape world opinion and by just that alone have become a major force in politics and influence.

Monopolies are generally a bad idea and when they become the conduit for the vast majority of information in peoples lifes then they can be incredibly dangerous and detrimental to democracy and freedom. They already are along with the BigTech players in the social media sphere which in the last decade or so have had an enormous impact in the daily functioning of society.

A challenge to this dominance is long overdue and it is time this power was taken away BigTech and put back into the hands of people again. It is against this backdrop that the new search engine called PreSearch.org brings a little bit of hope although it remains to be seen how it all pans out but it's launch is certainly welcome.

PreSearch.org are currently a commerical entity but in their white paper, they claim it is designed to ultimately be owned and controlled by a non-profit foundation and thereby avoid the harmful motivations of for-profit corporations. They have positioned themselves in the bitcoin and blockchain space but have ambitions to grow much larger. One of the key features and differences is that you can become part of it by ruuning one of your own decentralized nodes that processes the search queries and at the same time earn some cryptocurrency token which they refer to as Presearch Token (PRE). PreSearch allows advertising but the mechanism works by enabling advertisers to bid on (search) keywords using PRE tokens to have their ads displayed. Whoever stakes or commits the most tokens to a keyword has their ad displayed.

As they put it themselves they say:

The world deserves an alternative search engine that is open, transparent, and involves the community in product development, consensus and quality control. Presearch is building a sustainable decentralized search platform that represents the interests of the community, will be open source and transparent, and uses blockchain technology to align all stakeholders across a single unit of value: the Presearch Token (PRE).

There are three main Unique Value Propositions (UVPs) which explain why. There are several secondary UVPs that certain users also find very attractive.

1. User control over data and privacy
2. Payment for contributing value to the ecosystem
3. Decentralization of the search ecosystem

The software will be open source and this is where the community can contribute and anyone will be able to download and run the software for a node.