Hopeful Google Rival, Presearch, Registers 500 Million Tokenized Searches via Blockchain

Presearch, an aspiring competitor for the market in which Google is the king, internet searches, affirmed that over 500 million have been made on its tokenized business in over a year since the launch of the product.

Colin Pape, the founder of the company, has talked to TrustNodes recently. During the interview, he talked about his company Presearch and about how it works.

Presearch already has around one million users and 100 million PRE tokens have been distributed to them. People can use these tokens on the platform, but they cannot use them outside of it or trade them at the moment.

Despite being in its early stage, the company has already reached a degree of success. During the Initial Coin Offering (ICO), which happened in 2017, the company was able to raise $7 million USD worth of BTC and ETH. The launch of the platform happened last year.

At the moment, you can use the program to choose your browser. For instance, you can choose whether to search for something on Google or LinkedIn. However, the main ambition is to eventually have its own decentralized search engine for people to use. The project is fully open source, so people can easily access its code.

Each search gives 0.25 PRE tokens, around one cent. Each PRE token is around 4 cents right now and people can earn up to 8 PRE tokens daily. The cap is made so that people will not abuse the system to get money quickly.

At the moment, you can use the browser extension on Chrome, Brave and Firefox. Among the inspirations of the project, the DuckDuckGo browser was cited, as he does not hold any information from the users.

The company is already using alpha ads, though, as another way to fund the service. These alpha ads are shown at the side of the “coin flip” when people search.

While the project is far from being a Google competitor at this stage, this is the ultimate goal, to make everybody use the platform and ditch centralized platforms like Google, this will certainly be a huge task.

The main difficulty so far is to create a great decentralized search engine. While the project is very cool and interesting, it does not have the chances to become something great unless it develops its own tech, or else people will just use Google.

At the moment, some doubts on whether the model will actually work are still on the table, but the people involved in the project are pretty confident in its future.