Presearch AMA Recap

31 Aug 202005:08

AMA

Presearch AMA Recap

Cryptodiffer Team

Hello, everyone!😁

We are glad to meet here
Colin Pape (Founder & CEO of Presearch) (@ColinPape)

Colin Pape

Thanks for having me and the Presearch community again, Maks! Lots new since the last time we chatted!

Cryptodiffer Team

Yes, I believe so:)
Let's start from intro questions for thos who are not aware of what is Presearch and who are you!
Q1: Can you introduce yourself to our community?

Colin Pape

Yes, I'm the founder of Presearch.org. Prior to Presearch, I founded ShopCity.com.

We are building a next-generation search engine powered by the community.

We're preparing to launch our first decentralized version, powered by user nodes on January 28th.

The timing is very relevant with everything going on with Big Tech these days.

Super excited about the new platform and the opportunity to enable people to search privately and earn PRE tokens at the same time!
I've been in the search space for more than a decade and remember the 'open internet' before Facebook, Google, and others began taking over more and more of the web.

We're working hard to restore that paradigm and ensure that the internet isn't controlled by a handful of gatekeepers online.
For sure!

So first thing I'd like to do is invite everyone to create a free account at https://presearch.org.

Once you've done that, then please fill out this form and we'll add you to the list of beta testers for our new version:

https://presearchcommunity.typeform.com/to/UkDumktm

Presearch provides users with a Google-quality search experience, except we don't track or profile you, and you benefit from increased search choice, fewer ads and you can earn PRE when you search.

If you're interested in helping us take on the giants of the internet, you can help power the platform by running a node.

You can learn more at https://nodes.presearch.org.

The main demand generation mechanism for the token is our Keyword Staking platform that enables marketers to reach our audience based on the keyword they are searching for.

Whoever stakes the most PRE to a keyword has their ad displayed. You can try the platform out at https://keywords.presearch.org.
Looking forward to everyone's questions!

Cryptodiffer Team

thank you Colin, just one more question from our team and we will open chat for community questions
Q2: Let`s now talk about the milestones you have achieved so far and about your upcoming plans?

Colin Pape

Awesome! Great questions.
The last year was a really good one for the project.

We rolled out Keyword Staking last January and have more than 65m of 380m PRE staked already.

Then we were listed on KuCoin in April of 2020 just after covid hit.

At that time, we burned 50% of our token supply to keep us really focused on momentum and execution.
https://presearch.medium.com/presearch-completes-token-burn-a30cc62a438c
In June we were fortunate to have our long-time advisor, Trey Grainger, join us as our CTO. Since then, progress has really accelerated!

https://presearch.medium.com/leading-search-expert-joins-presearch-as-cto-2eb306901e0f
Next after that was the release of our new vision paper to replace our original white paper from 2017:

https://presearch.medium.com/meet-the-presearch-vision-paper-ae79bda8c58
As soon as Trey came on, then we started really focusing on the node-powered decentralized search engine and gave people a taste of the new search experience. https://presearch.medium.com/integrated-search-experience-and-rewards-evolution-f6d14beaf395
As we were preparing to roll this out, we ran into some challenges with the Ethereum network being clogged and gas costs going through the roof, and then shortly after that the KuCoin hack happened and we were affected. https://presearch.medium.com/high-eth-gas-fees-withdrawal-delays-and-options-moving-forward-a099a1fa2dc
We decided to take the opportunity to redo our withdrawals platform and also execute a token swap to upgrade our smart contract. Our initial contract was a little too secure and locked down, and it wasn't able to handle batched transactions or to work with decentralized exchanges, so we ended up making some major improvements.

https://presearch.medium.com/presearch-token-swap-complete-9a454d976a52
That then enabled us to list on Uniswap...

https://presearch.medium.com/presearch-now-on-uniswap-b4782f6a4c57
With all that behind us, we are now in an amazing position to capitalize on the shift to DEXs and incorporate advanced features into the token, including staking, DeFi opportunities and whatever other great opportunities come up!
The main thing we are focused on right now is the launch of our new decentralized search engine on January 28th.

We've been working on it for the better part of a year in its current form, and honestly, the search experience is 10x better than the current one.

You can find some videos, including a demo of the decentralized search engine on our new website, https://www.presearch.io.
This is how the new node-based engine works for anyone who is curious:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9NzK3hF_4WE&feature=emb_title
The search results this system provides are significantly better and much richer than before, including related information for queries, videos, photos, news and more integrated into the results.

Here's a screenshot of what it looks like:
Now that we have the new engine ready, we are able to finally move into mass awareness mode!

There are so many amazing opportunities to market this search engine to the world - the timing is amazing - we couldn't have asked for a better landscape to really launch into.

Many people are looking for alternatives to Big Tech, and they are also getting excited about crypto again!
We are building out our marketing team right now and have some extensive plans to grow users from our current 1.7m registered users to 10 million.
We'll be starting with the low-hanging fruit that is the crypto community, and then branching out to those who are interested in tech in general and alternatives to the incumbents, as well as reaching out to the communities that have been deplatformed or made to feel unwelcome by Google, Facebook, Twitter and others.

It's a market opportunity of well over 100 million people.
So excited to finally be ramping marketing up, as that's my main interest, and I see so many opportunities to get the word out, but our search experience just wasn't up to par until the decentralized version. Now it's time to go big!
Thanks for letting me provide this detailed overview on the project.

Looking forward to everyone's questions!

Cryptodiffer Team

Awesome, thank you for great answers
It is time to move to the community questions part.

Cryptodiffer Community

Will intending advertisers on the platform pay with PRE or other standard Fiat currency? Or there will be room for both forms of payment?

Colin Pape

Payments will be in PRE. Through https://marketplace.presearch.org, we're enabling people to easily buy PRE with fiat, and then we are replenishing PRE inventory sold there through the open market.

So it's easy for advertisers, but still 100% PRE-focused.

Cryptodiffer Community

How does Presearch plan to provide advertisers with more value while maintaining user privacy?

You recently completed your token burn, reducing your PRE supply by 50%. How has this affected the economy of PRE tokens? Do you have plans for re-buyback for incineration?

Colin Pape

Advertisers receive huge value right now because traffic is essentially free:

https://presearch.medium.com/free-keyword-staking-traffic-extended-3c79a5df1c0a

We just extended this free period for 6 months until the end of June.

The beauty of search is that you don't need the user's personal data - just based on what they've searched for, you have really high-quality traffic where the user has indicated their intent.

So many different industries are not even allowed to advertise on other search engines (Ex. crypto, cannabis, many other business opportunities, for example), and so it's a no brainer for those types of advertisers.

The plan is over time to enable users to share as much or as little information they want with advertisers and for their compensation from rewards to change accordingly so it's a value-for-value type model.
And the second part of your question is a good one as well.

The token burn really reduced the potential treasury supply to be sold from the project. We are already replenishing token supply on external markets for sale due to our limited internal inventory.

The plan is to re-sell inventory, not to burn more PRE.

As the network grows, the value of advertising and the appeal of keyword staking increases, driving more demand for PRE.

Cryptodiffer Community

What innovations does Presearch offer in DeFi and how Do Presearch changing the new DeFi ecosystem and what are the plans for the next few years?

Colin Pape

We are looking at a token leasing platform to enable those who hold PRE but don't need to stake it to lend it to others who can't afford to buy it outright, but want access to the advertising platform.

There are so many other staking opportunities within the platform as well. Ex. stake which default providers are on the homepage, stake to upvote or downvote search results, stake to have a website included in the index, stake to determine which community package shows up at the top of the results.

Many of these things will use similar defi mechanisms to what people are using in more traditional, finance-oriented projects.

We also see tons of opportunities to enable different projects that are complementary to create trading pairs with PRE and integrate the token into their ecosystem or have swaps to enable different features.

It's definitely an exciting time to be in crypto!

Cryptodiffer Community

Q1. Safety and user interface is paramount to every investor. So if I may ask what steps have you take to ensure the safety of users and investors assets? Have your contracts been audited for vulnerabilities and how easy is it to understand and use Presearch utilities?

Q2. I'm sure there'll be so many questions on the token value in the short term but I want us to focus on a much more important factor. What value would Presearch have in the long term? What value is Presearch adding to industries and the world at large?

Colin Pape

Yes, our contract was audited by Peckshield, a leading smart contract auditor, and is based on the OpenZeppellin framework.

If you browse our Github repo, you'll find the audit (https://github.com/presearchofficial).

The project is very long-term focused. We are building a credible alternative to Google and Bing.

This is the most centralized and influential industry in the world. We definitely need a project like Presearch to provide a way to access the open internet that isn't controlled by the big tech monopoly.

This can preserve access to information, ensure some resilience against censorship, and serve as a springboard for many other decentralized projects to be found, get traffic and compete against the centralized services they intend to replace.
Lots of great questions! Thanks, everyone!

Cryptodiffer Community

How does searches choose between different nodes? Is it random or will nodes staked with higher get more searches? What significance does geography have for which node is assigned a search?

Colin Pape

It's based on the node's reliability score (is it online all the time, or down sometimes), the response times (how fast results are returned), eventually the geographic location (to cut down on latency) as we launch more node gateways that are regionalized, as well as the number of tokens staked to the node.

There's more information in our vision paper if you are interested:

https://presearch.io/vision.pdf

Cryptodiffer Community

I can see Presearch Keyword
Staking $PRE is available but
I cannot find some APY information, can you reveal some details about% APY when users staking ? Compared to current projects their APY% get very high do you think will put a higher or equal rate to stimulate user participation

Colin Pape

We are not doing a yield-based staking model at this time.

The benefit that people get is the free traffic, which is super valuable and sustainable for the long-term.

You're right, some project APYs are ridiculously high and don't seem to make sense over the long-term.

Honestly, we are trying to attract people who support the mission more than those that are just in it for the short term financial gains. Those are possible as well, but that's not our primary focus.

Cryptodiffer Community

2. If there is a mistake in the smart contract that leads to a big security breach, would the project be completely destroyed because the smart contract cannot be modified?

Colin Pape

No. The original version was not able to be upgraded and this was an issue that required a swap.

The new contract is upgradable, and in a worse case scenario we'd need to do another swap, though this should not be required based on our new set up.

Cryptodiffer Community

Does Presearch have an advertiser ranking system that reflects the quality of a particular ad provider?

Will Presearch collect data about their users location? Google has a log of users location, how will Presearch securely store this information?

Colin Pape

We don't currently have ad quality scores, and the ads displayed are based purely on the number of PRE that an advertiser stakes.

We do have an ad reporting system that enables the community to identify any problematic ads.

We are currently dealing with ad reports internally, but plan to make ad reports open to the community so that a team of outside mods can make decisions on what ads need to be adjusted or removed.

In the future, we plan to enable community members to do 'inverse' keyword staking so that they can use their PRE to suppress ads if they feel compelled to go above and beyond an ad report.
And no, we do not log location information. There is the ability to still get local search results if you have the blue globe icon in the search field activated.

We basically map your IP to your general region (privately) and then we use that region for any local searches.

Cryptodiffer Community

Is it possible to run more than one node from one IP address? What requirements are there for a PC to drive nodes (RAM, HD) and how do you validate PCs?

Colin Pape

Right now, each node requires a unique IPv4 IP address.

That might change in time, but it is the current requirement.

As far as supported devices, we are using the Docker.com platform, so it's quite compatible and requires minimal resources - mainly 1gb of RAM, a solid connection with low latency and fast transfer speeds.

I believe there are some platforms that aren't currently compatible (we're working on supporting Raspberry PI devices for instance), but in general, it's pretty good.

You can join the @presearchnodes Telgram group for more information.

Cryptodiffer Community

How do you plan to grow your user base to maximize advertiser value before going into paid traffic mode?

What are the conditions for getting free targeted advertising traffic in Presearch? What is the minimum and maximum amount of PRE I need to stake?

Colin Pape

We are basically taking a page from DuckDuckGo - the founder of that search engine wrote a book called 'Traction' that's basically a manual on how to grow based on what DDG did, so we are not going to reinvent the wheel where possible.

Overall, having a consumer-focused general search engine is something that is very easy to market because it applies to just about everyone.

We need to get people signed up, using the service with browser extensions (https://presearch.org/extensions) and once they stick, it's a great long-term relationship.

Right now, very few people know about Presearch, so there's massive upside.

We don't need to reach Google scale to be successful.

Just DDG for instance is doing around $1b/year in revenue.

Main focus is on users who are actually using the search engine, not just farming tokens, and we are targeting users in North America and Europe with higher disposable incomes.

Minimum amount of PRE to stake is 1,000 PRE (around $30). There is no maximum. I believe bitcoin has the highest stake at around 6m PRE.
Hey Ry! :)

Cryptodiffer Community

What is the advantage of the new Presearch Engine powered by decentralized nodes and what strategies are you planning to expand the Presearch network and increase demand for tokens with ad stakers?

How does your new site access in-depth information about the projects monitored? And is it possible to access media and partner sites through the Presearch ecosystem?

Colin Pape

The new Presearch Engine user experience is just better - more relevant results, cleaner interface, additional information on-page that makes it a much richer experience, a little faster, more compatible with different browsers/languages/devices, etc.

Basically, since launching the new engine, there's no need to go to Google anymore. Before this version, even I was still going out to Google about 50% of the time. I never do anymore. Have heard the same thing from many beta testers. :)

So it's a lot stickier and trusted by people, which is huge.

It also provides us with a lot more control over the UI, which opens up more opportunities to optimize ads - we are using something pretty standard and generic right now for instance, but we can make that ad unit as engaging and useful as we want, and this will increase the value to advertisers.

Right now, in-depth project info is powered by CoinGecko and we will be working with them more as we enter marketing mode.

They have been great partners so far and we intend to work with them to take on the incumbents in the space. :)

Cryptodiffer Community

What will the public launch of a new Presearch decentralized search engine with powered by user nodes improve and create a sense of the user experience? Will the conditions for users who want to join these nodes in the future have been changed?

Colin Pape

We will be adjusting the rewards paid in the future as the value of the token increases, so now is the best time to use Presearch as rewards will definitely not be increasing as time goes and the network grows. 😉😀👍

Cryptodiffer Community

What are the major
Unique Value Propositions of Presearch and why should people use Presearch?

Colin Pape

You should use Presearch if you want to a better search experience that isn't censored, if you want to protect your privacy, if you're looking for more options and choice, to support a decentralized internet and if you want to be rewarded in crypto when you search. :)

For advertisers, it's free traffic, a more open network that is not controlled by black box algorithms designed to extract your money, if you want to reach hundreds of thousands of crypto enthusiasts, and experiment with new ad units and help shape the future of search marketing.

For node operators, it's an easy-to-setup node platform that you can run on your computer, it enables you to be part of a project that is standing up for the open internet and send big tech a message🖕, as well as earn PRE to provide infrastructure to Presearch.

Cryptodiffer Community

Who are the right audiences of Presearch.org and what methods of advertisment do you employ in reaching your right audiences?

When you get the right audiences, how do you plan to make them longterm users of Presearch.org?

Colin Pape

The three primary audiences are:

- Crypto enthusiasts
- Anti-big tech users - Presearch 'degoogle' for instance to see that movement
- Those being censored by big tech who feel like they need to switch platforms to companies/projects that align with their beliefs

In the early days we are focused on YouTubers, AMAs and PR to help spread the word.

We are experimenting with paid ads on Quora and YouTube.

Through decentralized alternatives like Flote, LBRY, etc. by sponsoring content creators.

Our referral program continues to be our main driver of new users and we have some new and improved ways to leverage it.

Once a user signs up, we send them an autoresponder email to get them to install our browser extensions.

We need to do more on mobile and will likely have a mobile browser out at some point in the not-too-distant future.

And then over the long-term, we need to earn and maintain user trust by doing the right thing.

Cryptodiffer Community

How does Presearch intend to develop a search engine with refined and accurate local results such as Google, Bing and others without invading the user's privacy and collecting their location data?

Does Presearch intend to create tools to be able to obtain more in-depth metrics about your keyword, because currently we can only get the views and clicks?

Colin Pape

To start we are leveraging existing resources to serve as the foundation of results, but then we'll be layering in our own index that will be curated by the community.

We do not need user data for targeted advertising, nor do we want the liability of storing this information.

We don't track searches or locations.

We are working on ways to be able to collect aggregated data over time to help us improve the platform, and have some novel approaches we're exploring.

Yes, we are working on some improvements to the keyword staking reporting tools. Will be in the first half of 2021.

Cryptodiffer Community

What is the main difference between PreSearch & DSearch?

A decentralized search engine is very interesting and positive for the internet in general, however I am concerned that this is a nest to allow illegal content, is there a way to regulate or control these things?

Colin Pape

Dsearch was a bit of an interim solution to help us bridge the gap between having no search engine of our own and driving people to Google, and where we are now, where we have an actual decentralized search engine.

Dsearch will remain operational after the new engine goes live, but it will no longer be the default and we may end up phasing it out eventually.

Yes, definitely some concerns there, but we believe there are ways to mitigate this through community curation, staking and open reporting systems that feed into governance mechanisms that enable people to dispute and resolve reports.

Cryptodiffer Community

Will ip address, account information or other sensitive information pass through the search node?

What are your expectations from a partnership with Unstoppable? Will this partnership become a great decentralized driver?

Colin Pape

No, that information is stopped at the node gateway level and never makes it out to user nodes.

I would like to have a way to access Presearch without relying on the ICANN domain name system, so there's definitely some synergies with Unstoppable Domains. We would like to be integrated as the default search engine for any project launching a browser.

Cryptodiffer Team

Thank you, Colin!
Great answers today.
Thank you everyone for your questions!
Don't forget to join the Presearch community!

Colin Pape

Awesome! Thanks, Maks! Thanks, everyone!