TL;DR
- Due to Google’s 92% market share, the search market is exceedingly concentrated.
- According to Pape, who spoke about Presearch in an interview with The New Stack, “I built a prototype for Presearch thinking of it as the Switzerland of search, with a multi-search user interface that would enable a group of search engines to break the Google stranglehold on search, but have those individual search experiences still respected.”
- This week, Presearch switched from the testnet environment to the mainnet.
- As the network expands, more geographic dissemination is anticipated.
- Presearch’s decentralized strategy for fusing infrastructure and search features from a diverse community is undoubtedly interesting and could gain popularity over time.
Due to Google’s 92% market share, the search market is exceedingly concentrated. That is being contested by Presearch, a decentralized search engine.
One of the main drivers for a sizable number of the businesses that self-identify as Web3 technology continues to be decentralization. I’m not aware of anything more concentrated than search, where Google retains a 92% market share, despite the fact that Facebook, Twitter, and other social media platforms attract a lot of attention for being centralized centers. Despite a few upstarts like DuckDuckGo carving out niche market share, no business has been able to challenge Google’s lopsided market share.
With a decentralized approach to creating a better search engine, Presearch hopes to change that. Colin Pape founded the business in reaction to the difficulties he encountered when competing with Google at his prior start-up ShopCity.com back in 2017. According to Pape, who spoke about Presearch in an interview with The New Stack, “I built a prototype for Presearch thinking of it as the Switzerland of search, with a multi-search user interface that would enable a group of search engines to break the Google stranglehold on search, but have those individual search experiences still respected.”
Presearch has changed over time to incorporate several Web3 components. The goal, according to Pape, “evolved to having a cryptocurrency at the center of everything, rewarding users for using the search, and [making] the currency the mandated payment mechanism for the advertising platform, to give it a source of demand and ultimately enable all these different contributors to participate in the ecosystem.”
This week, Presearch switched from the testnet environment to the mainnet. 65,000 nodes make up its decentralized infrastructure, with the majority of them being located in the United States. The transition of those nodes from testnet to mainnet is happening gradually. They have increased the global dispersion of their node gateways as part of the transition to the mainnet by adding gateways in Singapore and Frankfurt, Germany. In addition to routing search traffic, the gateways also anonymize the queries as they are sent to specific nodes, which finally provide the results that are shown in a webpage. As the network expands, more geographic dissemination is anticipated.
Earning PRE tokens, which are the Presearch cryptocurrency, is one of the incentives for operating a node, similar to other Web3 initiatives. Docker containers run the nodes. Presearch provides thorough setup instructions, and like other Web3 projects, it has an active support community on Discord. Preberry, a community-driven initiative to support nodes operating on Raspberry Pi hardware, keeping the entrance barrier relatively low in comparison to other Web3 initiatives.
The way Presearch approaches feature development is one of the things that interests me about them. The Knowledge Panels that show up next to search results, like the one below from a search for Docker, are probably familiar to you if you’re one of the 92% of searchers who use Google.
These have been delegated to the community by Presearch, so if you’re a developer with access to a relevant body of data on a particular subject, you may create a Presearch community package using the JavaScript template on GitHub and submit it for review. Your preferred set of tools may be used to create your data source, with JavaScript and HTML being used for implementation.
The only reason, according to Pape, that we can have more engineers working on search than Google is because of our community. Presearch intends to have an incentive program in the near future to further encourage developing out the community packages. Since we’re a fairly small team, the only way to compete is to enable the community to participate and identify those niche opportunities where Google and others will never go and where we can provide a high-value on-page experience. If more than one developer creates a suitable package for on-page knowledge panel findings, they also want to provide consumers a choice.
Building incredibly focused search experiences around specialized themes and integrating them into the Presearch result set is another potential way for developers to interact with Presearch.
Along with a few more specialized competitors, DuckDuckGo and Brave have each managed to take a little chunk of the enormous search market. Presearch’s decentralized strategy for fusing infrastructure and search features from a diverse community is undoubtedly interesting and could gain popularity over time.
Presearch now has 3.8 million registered users who do 150 million searches every month. That represents a tiny portion of Google’s daily search volume. Presearch has the potential for tremendous development, though, with an emphasis on anonymous surfing, a small amount of advertising on the page, and the chance for a developer community to provide value.
Join Presearch today by clicking here !
