Presearch - A decentralized search engine that pays you crypto (it's already live)

What if you could earn cryptocurrency from using an internet search engine? Well, now you can! Presearch is an Ethereum-based blockchain project which pays it's users in cryptocurrency for searching through Presearch.

A Google that pays you

It was only a matter of time. Just like how Steemit was a blockchain revolution in social media by paying it's users for using the platform, Presearch is looking to do something similar with search engines where users will be rewarded with PRE tokens for searching through Presearch.

The PRE tokens don't come out of thin air, or come from inflation as with STEEM, but Presearch is rather looking to set up an economy around the search engine where advertisers, developers, and users all partake. Advertisers can, for example, purchase PRE tokens to spend on promotional placement (=higher ranked) in the search results, or for ads that are displayed. These PRE tokens then enter the economy where users receive them for performing actions such as searches or clicking on sponsored results, or developers who get paid in PRE tokens for contributing to the development of the platform. The idea is to build a decentralized, community-driven search engine.

At least, that's the plan. Presearch intends to take it step by step. First they start as a (Canadian) company in stage 1, with plans to convert into a foundation during stage 2, with eventually complete decentralization as a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) on the Ethereum blockchain in stage 3.

Despite being in stage 1, as a centralized company, Presearch has an inspirational vision which they like to stress. About half the whitepaper is dedicated to the vision, and so is their promotional video:

Centralized tokens

Since Presearch is still in it's infancy, the search engine itself is not online yet and instead they utilize a 'search tool' which is essentially a gateway to existing search engines such as Google. If you use this search tool to search on Google, each result earns you 0.25 PRE tokens, with a maximum of 8 PRE tokens per day. These aren't ERC-20 tokens per se, yet.

What I mean by that is that Presearch is currently still mainly (entirely?) centralized. Their search tool works, and you can earn 'tokens' but these are not actually ERC-20 tokens, but rather just some digits in their own centralized database. They call these 'credits'. That's okay though, for now - the same is true for the crypto that you keep on centralized exchanges after all. Presearch does allow you to withdraw your PRE if you've got 1000 or more of them (this will be lowered in the future), at which point they do send you some actual ERC-20 PRE tokens.

I guess the point I'm trying to make is: right now Presearch is mostly just a company who raised a lot of money, and who are now giving users this money in the form of tokens for performing actions. It's not much decentralized, nor revolutionary at this point.

Earning Crypto is still great though

Despite the centralized nature of Presearch for the foreseeable future, it still does allow you to earn PRE tokens if you use their search tool. I have started using it yesterday and so far have made 15 PRE tokens, which at current price should be worth $1.65 which isn't bad at all for just two days. PRE tokens are currently only traded on smaller exchanges, but only HitBTC has volume in it.

The catch is that you can't (currently) withdraw until you have 1000 PRE tokens. At a maximum of 8 PRE per day the earnings are nice, but it still takes 125 days of full-earnings per day in order to reach the necessary 1000 PRE tokens (which would be worth about $110 if the current price persists). That's about 1/3 of a year, which is like eons in the cryptocurrency space. The project could very well fall dead before reaching the withdrawal amount. I also have a hard time believing a $110 payout per user per 4 months is sustainable in the long term for something that still sees very little usage (although - 100K users have signed up already according to their website).

Still, if it's not a success it should survive at least a couple of months, right? To me, it seems like it's worth a shot so I set up my browser and bookmarks and have decided to start using this from now on. The worst that can happen is that it turns out to be a scam, and they are collecting data for monetary profit. It would suck, but it's not the end of the world.

Invest?

While from a user's perspective the platform is enticing - who doesn't like free crypto? - it doesn't appear all that appealing to me as an investor. It seems to me like the speculative value of the PRE token is in it's scarcity and usage as a means for advertising/marketing. That means that the value of PRE is highly dependant on the usage of the search engine and while I do believe financial gain is a massive motivator, what stands in the way of Presearch is it's centralized start.

Due to it's centralized start I have a hard time seeing this project gain significant momentum in the foreseeable future. If they actually make it to stage 2 or even stage 3 I could see some sparks, but as it is that is still pie-in-the-sky and the reality is that you're investing in tokens of a centralized entity with a nice vision, and a portal to existing search engines.

Presearch draw my attention first when I discovered that their earn-crypto-by-searching platform was already live and users could already earn on it. Of course, I'm always looking for ways to get more crypto so I immediately tried it out. As I saw it working - too well almost - I just had to dig into the whitepaper and figure out what was going on. After reading the whitepaper I still like being able to earn crypto, but the vision is very ambitious, the team lacks all-stars and connections, and they have set a high bar that they have yet to prove being capable of reaching. We will have to see if they make true on it.

In the meantime, I'll be using Presearch to see if I can reach up to the required 1000 PRE tokens for withdrawal, or hopefully less than that if they lower the amount at some point. If you also want to try out Presearch you can give it a go by going to https://www.presearch.org/ (no referral code) and sign up for an account. Or if you want, use my referral code by clicking on this link (I'd appreciate it!)

Click here to go to the Presearch search tool