Unlike Google, it is decentralised and doesn’t track your digital footprint. From Moneyweb.
There’s no doubt that Google is a hard act to follow, but one up-and-coming search engine to watch is Presearch, which resolves the age-old complaint that Google tracks your digital footprint so it can firebomb you with ads, and that it censors certain content.
Presearch does not track your footprint and may be the first of a new batch of search engines that are decentralised and censorship resistant.
Read: Why Facebook and Google cannot be trusted
Presearch does post one or two ads depending on your search query, but these are relevant and discreet. But it will not skew its search results in favour of a particular political or politically correct slant.
It’s nowhere near Google in terms of size, but its growth is remarkable: traffic is up more than 2 000% since 2020, capturing nearly 5% of DuckDuckGo’s market share.
Presearch gets about four million searches a day, but can easily scale to hundreds of millions. Still, that’s tiny against the nine billion daily Google searches, which is equivalent to roughly 84% global market share. Over the past two years, Presearch has averaged 36% quarter-over-quarter growth, admittedly off a small base.
Presearch has more than 70 000 active nodes, each of which contributes computing power to the network. Its growth is in part due to Google listing it as a default search engine on all new Android devices in the UK and Europe.
Node operators (those who use node software to help find the information needed to answer user search requests) earn crypto tokens in the form of PRE, currently trading at about $0.05.
PRE token price (in USD)
Source: Coinmarketcap.com
Google’s dominance of the search engine market has declined from around 90% of all searches in 2010 to 84% in 2022, according to Statista. Microsoft’s Bing has captured roughly 9% of the market, Yahoo has about 2.5% and Russia’s Yandex with about 1.7%.
DuckDuckGo and the Brave search engines have also attracted loyal followings for presenting search results that do not bombard you with ads and in many instances are more accurate. Both allow you to search without tracking your footprint.
Brave, which is both a browser and a search engine, was among the first to overturn the Google business model of monetising user data by rewarding its users with crypto tokens.
It filters out the ads and trackers that follow you wherever you go online, and allows you to earn Basic Attention Tokens (BAT) should you decide you don’t mind seeing some ads.
Read: Exclusive: Durban venture capitalists buy Gumtree SA from eBay-linked Adevinta
Brave was developed by Brendan Eich, formerly of Mozilla and author of JavaScript.
A novel feature of the Presearch business model is that it allows advertisers to ‘stake’ (lock up) PRE tokens against specific words or search terms so that if a user searches a particular term, the algorithm will present the ad containing the words with the most staked tokens.
Basic Attention Token (BAT) in USD
Curiously, Yandex appears less prone to censorship than many of its competitors from the West and is preferred by many for its image search functionality.
Presearch is still something of a work in progress, with some of the functionality still in development, along with updates to the algorithm to improve latency.
For all the work going on in the background, the user experience is what counts.
A great feature is the ability to focus your search results to Twitter, for example, where you might want to limit results to ‘bitcoin bear markets’ or ‘Twitter free speech’.
Read: Five things Elon Musk wants to change about Twitter right away
You can use the default Presearch search engine or switch to results from scores of other providers, and get a sense of the difference in results. Users can also earn PRE tokens for simply using the search engine, and it has a browser extension that can turn Presearch into your default search engine.
Presearch was launched by CEO Colin Pape and Thomas LeClair, who previously set up Shopcity.com, a way for small businesses to expand their online presence.
The chief technology officer is Trey Grainger, an experienced engineer and data scientist.
Brave and Presearch have entirely different business models, where users get to earn rewards rather than hand those over to the company. This development was foreshadowed by George Gilder in Life After Google.
As Moneyweb previously reported, Gilder doesn’t see much of a future for Google, principally because it has lost sight of the internet primarily as a means of communication that also allows information to be copied and replicated.
Read: Life after Google: Prepare to witness the fall of a titan
There is huge backlash against Google and Facebook (Meta) for skewing search results and censoring views they deem disagreeable.
They have gone from town square, a place where people interact online, to town crier, where the tweak of an algorithm can sway voters and potentially unseat governments.
The likes of Brave and Presearch, and the others likely to follow, will now start challenging the behemoths that took our data and got rich off it, and they’re doing it without wearing the hat of public censor.
