Presearch: Free crypto for internet searches!

Hi fellow Steemians,

I stumbled across a great new service the other day! It's called Presearch . It combines things that we do every day with one of the other features we are all here on Steemit for: earning crypto!

My opinion
There is a better way for us to search the internet rather than doing it the typical Western way of one mega-corporation controlling what everyone sees and searches for. I believe with Presearch we can change this paradigm for the better. I do apologize but image uploading isn't working for this post so it's not as visually appealing as I would like it to be. I will try to fix that and if I do will delete this line.

Registration
To sign up for Presearch it's free of course and quite easy. They obviously require an email address and just some basic information. They didn't require a phone number which is great for many people. It can lead to numerous accounts but I believe that with many projects initially starting out they just want people in the gate rather than holding them away with requirements. They walk you through step by step the great features of the platform once you register and login for the first time.

Crypto Background
In exchange for us using their platform to search for whatever content we are going to they pay us in a crypto called PRE. The coin is an Ethereum based ERC20 coin. I didn't know exactly what an ERC20 is but after doing some research on it (on the Presearch search engine of course, earning some free crypto while writing this!) but this is an Ethereum based smart contract. The acronym ERC20 means Ethereum Request for Comment. It's commonly used for ICO (initial coin offerings) because of how easy it is to use and deploy to investors. source It looks like they are a new company to the game but I think with situations like these it is poised to go to great heights in our economy of internet searches particularly with early adoption.

Platform
The Presearch platform has some excellent features. They understand that they are indeed a search platform but they don't restrict you from using others. If you would like to continue to use Google or others you can, you can just simply go to Presearch and type in whatever you want to look for and you can have it search Google. It's essentially a middle man that takes credit for directing you to Google. This allows them to get paid for the assisted search and allows you to get paid for doing the search through them. They walk you through the process of adding quick buttons on the page when you start there; you can tell them the search engines you would like to use (and can even set one to default, I personally set it to default with Presearch since I don't want Google to get more traffic than it already does!), you can set some quick websites that you want it to go to such as Amazon, Home Depot among many others. The great thing about that is even if you do set some quick websites to go to, since you started at Presearch and go there you still earn some tokens for each click. Win in my book to do something I already was going to!

They have a ranking system that shows you who the top 50 people are who hold PRE tokens. This is useful in a sense but I think it would be more useful if you could search a user to find out how many they have. Perhaps that could come in a future update. The token holders can vote on projects that are proposed for the platform which is great. It gives a decentralized aspect to a very central idea. There will obviously be more weight given to those who hold higher amounts of tokens but still being able to vote is great.

That being said, there is an obvious caveat that any company that's looking to do well has to have. They do not allow you to remove all of your tokens for a set period of time. You have to earn at least 1000 PRE and be a registered user for 125 days before you can withdraw any of the currency. This is a great incentive to continue to use the product and it will grow it's reach. We are used to this type of restriction from being here on Steemit so I don't think it's a big deal at all. You can earn 8 PRE per day doing online searches so it's not difficult to attain that number over time.

The Staff
The company itself has an impressive resume of staff members; there are people spread across the modern tech industry. The two leads came from a fantastic website called Shop City. This is a site that focuses on local small business interaction with customers; you can register to be the liaison for a city or town and it will focus people that visit their local domains to the small businesses in the area. Coming from a project like this, the leads Colin and Rob understand that it's more about local and organic growth of areas rather than conglomerates controlling everything. In addition to a list of technical folks they also are affiliated with great staff members from the Ethereum project which is great that they got some advice from them.

Conclusion
I've been looking for an alternative to using Google for a long time. I found a suitable alternative last year but I didn't feel like it was really providing me with what I wanted; it said it was doing a good thing but I didn't really know if it truly was or that was just their advertisement. In finding Presearch, I am going to say that I will be using this for the long haul. It has a great look and feel to it, it rewards me with a currency that I think will do well in the future and it gives me another way to earn crypto outside of buying them from the exchanges.

Links to Presearch content
If you'd like to take a look at their website you can go here Presearch website
If you'd like to check out their White paper you can take a look here Presearch Whitepaper
If you'd like to start using their search engine you can go here Presearch

Sources:
ERC20