Meet Presearch, the Blockchain-powered search engine set to take on Google @BlockRush

The search industry has been heavily dominated by Google and this is something a new blockchain powered search engine is hoping to change.

Presearch is a decentralized search engine which hopes to hopes to incentive its users with curation rewards.

What is Presearch?

Presearch is the blockchain project to create an open, decentralized community-powered search engine with curation rewards for users. The team hopes to release its first viable product in September this year.

Here is a quote from the whitepaper:

While there are a number of alternative search engines, Yahoo / Bing and Baidu being the largest, and a number of smaller engines such as DuckDuckGo, YaCy (peer 2 peer), Gigablast and others, there is little usage and innovation (except maybe DuckDuckGo), and Google dominates search.

Currently, for 77% of all trips onto this highway, everyone is squeezing through a single ramp. This extreme degree of centralization has had two main negative effects:

1. The ‘stops’ along the highway: content producers, webmasters, marketers and businesses, organizations, etc., are all extremely crowded alongside that ramp, fighting to be seen, paying more than $50 billion per year for scraps of attention.

2. Those who control the single on-ramp are in a position of extreme power and privilege as the directors of traffic and have the ability to increasingly lock in their position, ensuring their ultimate long-term dominance.

Having one company in this position of extreme power is particularly troublesome because it enables them to operate in a very opaque, top-down, almost-oligarchical manner.With great power comes great responsibility; a responsible gatekeeper would recognize the need to be continually more accountable, open and provably fair.

Unfortunately, Google appears to be abdicating their responsibility as the primary gatekeeper of the Internet by becoming increasingly secretive and taking few steps to become more transparent, 9 10 11 despite having more than 15 years as the dominant search engine and billions of dollars in capital. They default to ‘just trust us’ messaging in place of processes, information, and communication and hide behind their algorithm, justifying their secrecy by blaming hackers and spammers who would take advantage of any information they share.

Token Ecosystem

• Maximum cap on crowdsale: 200,000,000 tokens
• Total token supply: 1 billion (1,000,000,000)
  • 5% sold in pre-sale
  • 20% sold to early adopters
  • 30% for future public sale
  • 30% allocated for distribution to reward usage, contribution to, and promotion of the platform
  • 15% retained by the dev, marketing and community teams
• Standard: Ethereum ERC20 token
• Purchase methods accepted: BTC and ETH

The ICO crowdsale would begin between June 25th and August 25th 2017. The prices of each token would be proportional to participation and there are no thresholds expected.

The Presearch team

Presearch does have some solid people behind its project.

Colin Pape - Project Lead

Colin is a serial entrepreneur who founded the community commerce network, ShopCity.com. In 2011, Colin found himself mired in a battle with Google and realized that the world desperately needs a transparent and open search engine.  

Rob Calvert -Technical Lead

Rob has more than 20 years experience in application development, network security and project management. Prior to joining ShopCity.com, Rob worked in a C-level position for a big three accounting firm in the Caribbean.

Nolan Dubeau - Product Development Lead

Nolan’s career as a web dev saw him work with CRYPTOCard, Mercedes-Benz and JDS Uniphase, leading to positions as Creative Director, Interactive at XM Radio and VP Engineering at Guardly, a VC-backed tech company.

David Keefe - Lead Frontend Developer

David joined the ShopCity.com team in 2012 as part of the content department and has worked his way up to become a senior developer. David is largely responsible for frontend development and customer-facing product improvements.

Corey Piitz - Senior Fullstack Engineer

Corey has been programming for more than 25 years, working at vertical marketplace Labx.com, instructing college-level programming courses and serving as lead fullstack engineer for ShopCity.com.

Pre-search advisors

Rich Skrenta

Rich was the founder and CEO of Blekko, an Internet search engine acquired by IBM Watson. Blekko raised capital from a host of Silicon Valley’s most notable investors and venture capitalists. A serial entrepreneur, Rich also founded news aggregator Topix and the Open Directory Project (DMOZ.org). With his extensive background in search and business, Rich advises Presearch on all aspects of operations and go-to-market strategy. 

Addison Cameron-Huff

Addison is a leading Canadian technology lawyer who specializes in blockchain technology startup law. Addison has worked for Etheruem co-founders and is a well known speaker at blockchain law events. He has contributed to various publications such as Bitcoin Magazine. Addison is a programmer and lawyer - he is the founder of a number of legaltech startups, including a legal search engine, Global-Regulation.com. He brings a unique perspective in his role as a legal advisor and counsel to Presearch. 

Trey Grainger

Trey is the SVP of Engineering at Lucidworks, a tech company powering search for many of the world's top companies. Trey has been involved in open source search communities since 2008 through the Apache Lucene/Solr project, which produces the most popular open source search technology in the world. Trey also co-authored Solr in Action, the leading book on Apache Solr. Trey advises Presearch on open source search technology, community and blockchain. 

Our take on Presearch

Presearch is an ambitious project, there is no doubt about that and we would want to see how well the project does.

The projects does seem to have a solid management team and greatly experienced advisers. Its curation reward system might also drive adoption just like Steem's reward system drove people to it.

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Stop giving, giving, giving - nothing! Time to redefine generosity the Steem way! @BlockRush

Tell us your take on the Presearch project

• Is Presearch a feasible project?
• Can presearch succeed where the liked of DuckDuckGo, Yahoo and Bing have failed?
• Is Presearch a necessity or just another ambiotious project?
• Would you consider investing into Presearch tokens?

Let us know of your thoughts by commenting below! Follow @BlockRush to receive updates on the #Bitcoin, #Blockchain, #Presearch as well as other intriguing#Blockchain reports.

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