Presearch, the private, “decentralized” search engine with 3.8 million registered users and 150 million monthly searches, has announced its Mainnet launch, “shifting all search traffic to run on its decentralized network of community-run nodes.”
Rather than using centralized computing infrastructure that is fully controlled by one company, Presearch “runs on nodes distributed on computers run by thousands of community members all around the world.”
These nodes “provide the decentralized computing resources required to power the network, privately running anonymized queries and returning results for incoming searches.
Colin Pape, Founder of Presearch, said:
“In a world where one company controls 92 percent of the search engine market and the flow of information for billions of people, there’s a clear need for a decentralized, Web3 alternative. Presearch offers a community-run alternative to centrally-controlled search engines like Google, DuckDuckGo, and Brave. Today’s Mainnet launch is a major milestone for the Presearch community and for the future of search.”
In 2018, Google was “fined 4.24 billion euros by the European Commission for unfairly using Android to solidify its search engine dominance.”
Google agreed “to make changes to its default settings, making Presearch a default search engine option on all Android devices across the U.K. and Europe in 2021.”
Nearly 70% of smartphone owners in Europe use Android, which “helped lead to a significant increase in Presearch downloads on Android devices.”
Now the “leader” in decentralized search, Presearch has built “a growing network of 65,000 nodes run by community operators to power its Testnet search engine.”
Today’s launch marks the transition of the platform’s significant traffic over to this decentralized network of nodes “as they migrate from Testnet (early testing) to Mainnet (production).”
The decentralized network will now “process over 5 million daily private searches with the ability to scale to hundreds of millions.”
Node operators are “rewarded with Presearch’s PRE cryptocurrency for each successful query they process, enabling them to capture a piece of the value of the network, similar to how Bitcoin miners earn BTC when they process financial transactions on that network.”
The current node software “supports the collection of information from external sources, and future updates will enable nodes to perform additional functions including web crawling, indexing, distributed storage, training AI models, and other tasks to power the search engine.”
Trey Grainger, Presearch CTO, remarked:
“Instead of a few companies acting as gatekeepers controlling information access for the whole world, Presearch is pioneering a better future where search algorithms can be built and run openly by anyone, vetted by everyone, and where choice and control is given back to those using the search engine. We’re grateful to the Presearch community for enabling this important milestone as we all launch the Presearch Mainnet together.”
As covered, Presearch is a privacy-focused, “decentralized” search engine with 3.8 million registered users and 150 million monthly searches, “making it one of the world’s 10 most-visited blockchain websites and one of the fastest-growing alternatives for search.”
Community-driven and powered by a global network of node operators, Presearch “is able to operate as a decentralized search engine.”
The network is powered by the PRE token, which “enables the transfer of value between searchers, advertisers, node operators and other community members who contribute to the network’s growth.”