Presearch AMA Recap
CryptoDiffer team
We are glad to meet here
Colin Pape (@colinpape), Founder and CEO of Presearch
Colin Pape
CEO
Hey guys! Thanks for having me! Great to meet the community! Our admin, Marco has been a member for a while and has some great things to say about the group!
CryptoDiffer team
Q1: Can you introduce yourself to the community? What is your background and how did you join Presearch?
Colin Pape
CEO
Yes, thanks. I’m the founder and CEO / Project Lead. We launched the Presearch project in July of 2017, but originally built it as an internal product back in 2013/2014. My background is as a developer, and I’m also the founder and CEO of ShopCity.com.
We ran into a legal challenge with Google back in 2011 when they blocked a bunch of our sites, and it opened our eyes to the enormous influence they have on the web and got us thinking about the need for an alternative.
CryptoDiffer team
Q2: Can you briefly describe what is Presearch in 3-5 sentences? What technology stands behind Presearch and why it’s better than the existing one?
Colin Pape
CEO
Presearch is building a decentralized search engine, powered by the community. It leverages the PRE token to reward searchers for switching their searches to Presearch, and is a multi-search environment, with more than 100 search engines available to direct your search query to.
The PRE token is also the payment mechanism for our ad platform, which we’re launching our latest version of on Wednesday the 29th. It uses Keyword Staking to determine which ads are displayed.
Search is about the most centralized / concentrated area on the web, and yet it’s profoundly important. It basically controls what we learn about as we are looking for the information we need. And yet the current paradigm is a total black box with no community input or oversight and ultimately just geared to drive shareholder returns. We believe we need an open and transparent version that is accountable to its users, so that’s what we’re building.
It’s going to take a moment to realize the ultimate vision, so we are taking pragmatic steps toward the goal, and are focusing on the user experience and token economy to start.
We have more than 1.3m registered users and 10m visits per month, so we’re having some great validation and traction already.
https://medium.com/@presearch/who-uses-presearch-7ec65c4170ad?source=———4——————
Here’s a bit about Keyword Staking: https://medium.com/@presearch/what-is-keyword-staking-b063324a2e85?source=———10——————
As far as the technology, we’re currently running a mainly centralized platform, as we’re waiting for blockchain tech to mature. None of the platforms, outside of possibly Steem, would support our current number of microtransactions, and we’re not confident enough in it to go all-in. So we’re basically leveraging Ethereum and doing batches, where microtransactions are handled in a database and then larger quantities of tokens can be withdrawn to the blockchain.
The ultimate vision is to develop node software that works as a browser plugin and standalone browser that enables users to crawl the web as they surf the internet and then contribute that information into another layer of nodes that runs on excess data center capacity to index it, and then distribute it out to IPFS or back to the original crawler nodes. Of course everyone involved in this process would be compensated in PRE.
Cryptodiffer Community
SHOPCITY. COM is a former company PRESEARCH.
Is this company as successful as you would expect?
Why do you have 2 SHOPCITY & PRESEARCH companies? Can you divide the time for these 2 companies?
Colin Pape
CEO
Great question. Still running ShopCity.com. It’s profitable and has management in place that is largely responsible for driving it forward. I am involved in strategy, product development and go-to-market, but the general execution is happening with others. It is a long-term play. Local is a very challenging space, and our franchise-like model requires booting up the platform time and time again in different communities. If you look at the growth of franchises like McDonalds or corporate stores like Starbucks and Walmart, the growth curve is similar.
It’s not always easy, but we are executing pretty well on both ventures, and they are synergistic. Many of our earliest token purchasers are our City Managers from ShopCity.com who plan to resell PRE to their local business customers.
Having almost 20 years in the local search space has prepared me well for the Presearch opportunity, and when Presearch is really meeting its full potential it will help that business to minimize its dependency on Google.
Cryptodiffer Community
How is your search engine better than GOOGLE or others?
And is there a PRESEARCH plan to add to the search field in the language we are from?
Colin Pape
CEO
Let’s be honest, it is tough to be BETTER than Google. We are different in our approach, ethos, multi-search experience – which really appeals to power users and web workers, and of course the token incentives. Where we can be better is through our Community Packages, which we’re going to be focusing more on in Q2 to try to go deeper in various niches than Google ever would as they’ll be built by actual users.
https://github.com/PresearchOfficial/presearch-packages
Cryptodiffer Community
How can Preserch provide security to users data? How do you overcome the threat of centralization in your project?
Colin Pape
CEO
The project is already fairly centralized, and the vision is to decentralize it. Ultimately, we will incorporate blockchain technology everywhere that makes sense. We don’t collect user data because we don’t want that responsibility.
We run multiple backup snapshots currently, and basically our ethereum blockchain is leveraging their security model which appears to be quite good.
The ultimate vision is to have a community-governed resources, with many forks or mirrors of the platform to handle local needs, and the ability to use PRE interchangeably. It is going to take some time to get there though.
Current totally decentralized search engines like YACY are just unusable, so we figured this was a much better approach to success – go for adoption, figure out the tokenomics and then the tech as it matures. It’s still early days for blockchain and distributed tech.
Cryptodiffer Community
1. What can I use the PRE token in the Presearch ecosystem for? What are the benefits of holding it in the long run?
2. What is the role of the community in the development of the Presearch? What do you do to help the community understand and contribute to the ecosystem?
Colin Pape
CEO
The PRE token is our reward token to incentivize user action. It is also the payment / staking token for the advertising platform.
Currently, we are very active with our Telegram community. We plan to introduce a ‘Task Pool’ platform later this year that will enable people to participate actively in directing the activities of the project, and then ultimately for governmance to be decentralized with onchain voting by the community.
Here’s a bit of a summary of the current uses:
https://medium.com/@presearch/the-presearch-pre-token-fde79b2323cf?source=———3——————
Cryptodiffer Community
What are the utilities of a PRE token? What are the benefits for long-term investors?
Colin Pape
CEO
You can buy tokens to stake and secure keywords that will provide you with traffic at no charge for the introductory period of about a year. We anticipate that staking is here to stay and will introduce leasing and other options over the long term.
In the short term, we’re focusing on the affiliate marketer opportunity as it’s a great one:
https://medium.com/@presearch/free-traffic-for-affiliate-marketers-7a20d18b6b1c?source=———8——————
Cryptodiffer Community
Q1 = Presearch is really a best platform & i personally using it in my PC from 6-7 Months ! But Is Presearch have any plans to Launch any Personalized Browser for android or Mobile users?
Q2 = I see that Presearch have 3 types of account which are saving, Reward & Portal accounts ! So, can you explain the differences of these three types of accounts?
Colin Pape
CEO
Thanks, so much! Really appreciate the comments and your support!
Yes, we just launched a new mobile browser for Android today actually:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.presearch&hl=en_US
It’s coming to iOS in the next couple of months. Looking forward to your feedback.
The portal account is for those who participated in our original crowdsale. Rewards is for what you earn for searching, and savings is what you’ll use for staking and for any purchases made through https://marketplace.presearch.org
Cryptodiffer Community
As i can see presearch is a unique search engine which pay users really great concept MY question is for using presearch user need to go presearch.org and after search what he want this could be very long process do you have any plans to launch any browser or any plans to partner with browser so people can set presearch broswer as default?
Colin Pape
CEO
You can use our browser extensions currently – that’s the easiest way to use it:
Here’s chrome/brave:
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/presearchorg-search-exten/inpoelmimmiplkcldmdljiboidfkcfbh
Here’s firefox:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/presearch-org-search-extension/
Will definitely work on more integrations to become default though. That’s a huge opportunity.
Cryptodiffer Community
What are the crucial usecases of Pre token ? What is your Total Addressable Market(TAM) and what do you estimate is the maximum share your network will take ?
Colin Pape
CEO
The Google Ads model is the most profitable and successful business model in history.
Contextual search ads are hugely valuable as you have the user’s ‘transactional intent’ and they have an immediate need when they’re searching.
It’s basically a $100b opportunity:
https://medium.com/@presearch/keyword-advertising-a-100-billion-dollar-opportunity-380739dc422f?source=———11——————
Crucial use cases have been covered lightly in some previous answers and here’s a bit of a summary:
https://medium.com/@presearch/the-presearch-pre-token-fde79b2323cf?source=———3——————
Cryptodiffer Community
All eyes are looking forward to the 29th of January as regard to PRE staking, please what advantages for me to stake and how robust/secure is the staking
How does your solution deal with the 3 pain points of diversity, simplicity and convenience because Millenials love simplicity?
Colin Pape
CEO
We are really excited about the opportunity.
You basically stake to receive traffic, and you can monetize that traffic through affiliate programs:
https://medium.com/@presearch/what-is-keyword-staking-b063324a2e85?source=———10——————
https://medium.com/@presearch/your-staking-strategy-242aca2f6e8d?source=———9——————
https://medium.com/@presearch/free-traffic-for-affiliate-marketers-7a20d18b6b1c?source=———8——————
Security is the same as our portal. Ultimately, we may enable you to hold tokens on chain, but for now, you need to transfer them into the portal.
If there were a major security breach, we’d be doing a token swap. For minor ones, we’d eat those losses.
We’re working on the ability for you to ‘back up’ or prove conclusively your portal holdings, but for now, you can do screenshots, etc.
We do frequent snapshots of the database of course, and we are committed to working with the security researcher community.
I think the best approach is to stay humble, be generous with bug bounties and keep things simple.
We’ll do our best to keep things secure over time and appreciate the contributions of everyone who’s helping us to continuously improve.
Cryptodiffer Community
For the search engine you will need a lot of cloud capacity, both storage and compute inventory of indexes and with a high service level How do you think to achieve that?
Colin Pape
CEO
We are looking at IPFS to basically mirror nodes. It’s still largely theoretical at this point as the tech just isn’t mature yet. If you have an interest in the subject, we’d love to hear your thoughts. You can join our main telegram community @presearch. Thanks for the question.
Cryptodiffer Community
Trust , Security and liquidity is very important for an exchange. Does presearch project has any strategies to attract users in future ??
Colin Pape
CEO
Yes, absolutely. We have really not focused here yet as we’ve been more focused on the utility of the token and have largely left exchange listings, etc. to the community. As the project evolves and more clearly is not a security, we are turning our focus to this distribution channel to make it easier for people to participate in the PRE economy. We started working with Probit last year to provide an alternative to HitBTC as many users were complaining. We are currently speaking with Kucoin and planning to list there in Q1 of this year as they have a good reputation.
As the project expands, we are confident that the other challenges will begin to be resolved.
Ultimately, we do need liquidity and a valuable asset to attract users, so that’s the angle we are coming at it from.
Cryptodiffer Community
What is your next plan? How much time will it take for #PRE to get into mainstream adoption and execute all the plans set for this project ?
Colin Pape
CEO
We are already one of the top 5 blockchain projects in terms of usage, so we are going to continue to expand there. We really have not even tried to attract users yet, aside from having an initial target of 100k for testing purposes, but our referral program blew up and we ended up doubling our goal within 30 days of launch.
With the new ad platform, and some developments that have turned search queries from a significant expense into a profit center, we are now shifting gears to user acquisition and have some big plans for partnerships, community initiatives, PR and paid channels to grow usage. We plan to be at 5m users by the end of 2020, with a moonshot goal of 10m plus.
Search is a very used utility, so the market is huge and if we can get users, we’ve found the platform to be fairly sticky. More than 25% of those who have signed up continue to be active users, which is a big number.
Cryptodiffer Community
Q1. How your search compares with other search engines ?
Q2. ADOPTION and UTILITY is very key to project survival and success, what’s being done to drive global adoption of Presearch amidst crypto regulations, legislation and competition?
Colin Pape
CEO
DuckDuckGo is probably our closest competitor as they are also focused on privacy, but they are totally different in that they are not leveraging blockchain and rewards, are not really community-focused, and don’t have the same approach to multi-search functionality.
You can search DDG or any other of 100 current search resources through Presearch, so we can really work with everyone and add a rewards / advertising layer on top of whatever they are doing.
With time, our rewards will become more valuable and our advertising less-intrusive, so we think that’s a winning formula to acting as a search access point that exists above standalone search engines.
As far as adoption and utility, have spoken to that already a fair bit. We have significant adoption already and will be growing it a ton this year.
From a regulatory standpoint, we’ve really tried to focus on the utility and ensure that this is viewed as a commodity that powers an ecosystem, the same way you can buy stock photo credits, buy and sell airmiles, etc.
With our background with ShopCity, we have always thought in terms of revenue vs. investment, and functionality and actual use vs. speculation. We feel like we’re blazing some trails here and are very close to some breakthroughs that enable us to continue to discuss things that appeal to people’s self-interest, but in a way that is more about the utility provided than tokens strictly as an investment asset.
For instance, keyword staking has huge potential to drive returns, but through affiliate program monetization. That helps us have those very powerful messages and conversations without strictly focusing on ‘investing in the token’ as other projects do.
Cryptodiffer Community
Adoption is one of the #important factor that all sustainable blockchain projects should focus to be more attractive in the #invertors’ eyes. Can you tell me what ##PRE has done and plan to do to achieve #Adoption in the reality, real use cases, our real society.?
Colin Pape
CEO
Yes, absolutely. That is our main focus – driving usage and utility as I’ve discussed in a few other answers. Thanks for your question!
Cryptodiffer Community
Presearch being one of the top 5 properties in the blockchain space with more than 1.3 million registered users and about 10 million monthly visits is really amazing. How do you plan to continually remain in the top 5 rank because i know it’s a very tough competition for you?
Colin Pape
CEO
Yes, it’s going to be a huge focus going forward. We need to make the product easier to use, ensure that our rewards are valuable and liquid, and start doing more distributions that make sense. There are a ton of different browsers, there’s a huge opportunity with content providers that we see, to integrate search results into their content to add value to it, wordpress plugins so you can add our search field to your website, etc.
We have lots of plans for 2020 to ramp up distribution, but those are a few at a high-level.
Cryptodiffer Community
How do you differ from Google? Does it safe to surf using Presearch? How will you handle user’s data privacy if that user searches private information using your platform? Does our data encrypted?
Have plans about staking?
Colin Pape
CEO
You can search Google through Presearch as many users do. I’ve touched on some of the ways we’re different from Google and DDG above.
We do not store any search information at all. Your login data is encrypted and your reward history is there, but it’s basically just date stamps and amounts, same as what you can see here: https://www.presearch.org/account/tokens/rewards
Cryptodiffer Community
Q1. How is Presearch able to ensure my searches remain private? Does Presearch provide any protection from other sites tracking me?
Q2. Where does your search results come from? Is my privacy protected?
Colin Pape
CEO
It’s tough to protect your searches outside of Presearch. We do not store anything, and if you use our https://engine.presearch.org engine, we are not saving any information or passing it through to our API partners.
Dsearch is monetized by both our new keyword staking platform and some external ad networks. We are not associating anything from your Presearch account to Dsearch, but it is possible that external networks are doing the same thing as Google or Bing would do with your data as they are the partners that power that platform.
If you are looking for the most privacy, I’d suggest, Engine or DuckDuckGo through Presearch.
Cryptodiffer Community
How does Presearch evaluate the importance of the user community? In the near future, does Presearch have any special plans to attract and expand the community?
How did Presearch survive in during long bear market? what your team strategy to gain more adoption? Can you share us on recent achievement your team are most of?
Colin Pape
CEO
Our community is insanely important to us. We are super active on Telegram and I am available every single day there and respond constantly to DMs. In the future, looking to integrate community more into our platform, but it’s a bit down the track. We’ll be launching a Task Pool system in the future that will enable people to post tasks, upvote them, fund them, claim them and capture rewards when tasks are completed and reviews / feedback validate the output.
Crypto winter wasn’t fun for most projects. We are HODLers and so that didn’t help. We cut expenses, focused more on the immediate token economics, found buyers for our tokens and pushed through. We didn’t sell equity, take on debt or otherwise jeopardize the vision for the project. It helps that we have another business as well. Super stoked about the new keyword staking platform and our 1.3m registered users!
Cryptodiffer Community
Will Presearch focus most on the American market? I have read that you are particularly interested in South American countries. Why is America important to you?
Will you have any new events such as the landing page design contest that you organized on December 21? I think events like this will increase the participation of your community supporters?
Colin Pape
CEO
Yes, we are mainly focused on America at the moment as we are based in Canada and have many relationships and insights into this market. Central / South America is likely ground zero for crypto critical mass, and we have a huge presence there already. Looking to be a big part of the crypto revolution that is brewing there! 🙂
Yes, there will be more contests and we’re launching a Trello board this week that has all of the community initiatives organized and available in one place. Thanks for your interest!
Cryptodiffer Community
Are they having enough qualifications and experience to deliver a world class project, Preseaech??
What are Team’s plans to make PRE a top project on Coinmarketcap?
Colin Pape
CEO
We are attracting great talent to the team – our advisors include one of the top crypto investment fund managers, Tim Enneking, Try Grainger, who literally wrote the book on open source search and is the Chief Algorithm Officer at Lucidworks, the top open source search provider in the world powering sites like Reddit, Walmart, Home Depot, etc., Rich Skrenta who founded the open directory project, which turned into DMOZ and was the foundation of the early search engines like Yahoo, he ended up starting another search engine that was sold to IBM and he became executive director at IBM Watson, etc. We are a small team, but we are focusing on the key wins and leveraging existing tech where possible.
Plenty of plans to break into the top 100, but it’s a pretty broad question I’m sure will be answered throughout the AMA.
Cryptodiffer Community
Why your search implementation would not work without a separate token ?
What is your Monetary Policy? Inflationary? Deflationary? Fixed supply forever? What is your Fiscal Policy? Instamines, premises, buying, spending or burning any tokens?
Colin Pape
CEO
Our token is used for rewards, staking and advertising, and in the future for governance.
It would be impossible to do these things without PRE or using bitcoin for instance.
It is a fixed supply of up to 1b tokens. We are mainly planning to mint tokens to satisfy reward requirements and to sell them to advertisers who stake them, up until we have no more tokens to mint, between now and then we need to transition to a model where reward tokens are provided directly by sponsors, and where there is a consumptive charge on the traffic received through keyword staking. To start, this traffic has no consumptive token cost. We are currently engaged in buybacks directly from holders and outside markets to replenish our supply that we are selling to advertisers through our marketplace. No burning is in the plans.
We will be releasing more details on this plans in the coming weeks.
Cryptodiffer Community
How is your search engine better than GOOGLE or others? And is there a PRESEARCH plan to add to the search field in the language we are from? For example, I come from MALAYSIA
Colin Pape
CEO
Thanks for the question. Have answered the first part already. Yes, we do plan to offer true localization. It is likely later in 2020.
Cryptodiffer Community
1. Preseach aim to be a direct competitor of Google using the creative of the commutinity, to be honest this is very possible to be done. But the community needs incentives and tools to build a strong site. so what do you offer to them?
2.Everyday the users just can do 32 searches per day. But how this works? when you finished the 32 searches you need to wait 24 hours to get rewards again? or the exist end days hours ( example the 00:00)?
3.The principal PRE token pair is with BTC, ETH and USDT (this last one just on ProBIt), do you have plans to create you own exchange, with others Cryptocurrencys?
Colin Pape
CEO
Yes, we agree! PRE tokens is the reward that will power the Task Pool platform I’ve alluded to. Will have more info about this in the future.
Yes, we are basically just rewarding up to 8 PRE per day currently. Other searches done outside of this model are uncompensated. We will likely decrease rewards in the future. We are currently offering an incentive of double PRE (0.5 per search) for using Dsearch.
No plans to create a traditional exchange, but yes to enabling more peer-to-peer functionality. Other pairs with complementary currencies do make sense, though aren’t on the immediate horizon.
Cryptodiffer Community
Why is Presearch built on Ethereum?
What are the advantages in terms of security, reliability, speed and cost?
Can scalability and interoperability problems occur? Why is compliance and security important in the ecosystem?
Colin Pape
CEO
It’s currently the most-supported blockchain that we could build on, with solid security, reliability, speed and cost. Ultimately, we may switch to another blockchain, particularly when we get to the point that we need to put microtransactions out into the public, but no plans to switch to an alternative yet.
Yes, huge potential issues with the current scale we are operating at and costs, for instance.
Not as focused on compliance. Security is the most important thing for sure.
Cryptodiffer Community
Who can use Presearch? Is it for only private companies or will it be available for public and government organizations as well?
Colin Pape
CEO
Everyone can use Presearch. There is definitely an interesting opportunity to provide pre-configured Presearch instances that have all of the resources a given company, organization or industry would find valuable. That is on the roadmap to enable these customized collections to be created and shared easily.
Cryptodiffer Community
What’s real-world use of Finnexus ? Where can we expect the use of Finnexus services? For which types of problems relief is expected from Finnexus ecosystem?
Colin Pape
CEO
The real use cases will be directly connected with our products, like the first one UM1S, it will be a tokenized product of the real world credit asset. You can use the services with wallets, exchanged and other channels. All will be released before launching. We are trying to solve 3 problems, diversity, value and convenience.
Cryptodiffer Community
Have PRESEARCH had any problems with getting into countries that have strict internet laws such as China?
Colin Pape
CEO
Not yet, but we do anticipate potential issues as we grow and get big enough to become a target. Hopefully we are fully-decentralized and unstoppable by that point. 🙂
Cryptodiffer Community
How do you plan to enter the search field in non-English native languages?
When compared with other Blockchain technology solutions, what advantage does Presearch have ? Whom do you think the competitors for Presearch in Blockchain industry ?
Colin Pape
CEO
I think the first question has been answered. We are really not a blockchain ourselves at this point, and will leverage other chains unless absolutely necessary.
We bring huge potential usage to many blockchains, so there is a lot of interest in having Presearch switch to theirs from Ethereum.
Cryptodiffer Community
Is presearch already a profitable startup, and if not, when do you anticipate it to become such one? Briefly, what is your financial model – where will the profit come from and how are you planning to grow it?
Colin Pape
CEO
Yes, we are profitable. We sell PRE tokens to advertisers until our supply runs out, then we will make money on cost per click or other performance based advertising. We also have a fiat revenue stream through existing ad networks.
Cryptodiffer Community
1) The phase 3 of your milestone page, do so much focus on the community engagement, what do you think is the appropriate strategy improve the community ?
2) In many websites says than many user”s account was “freeze” for suspicious activity. What is the aspects or cases to the get account blocked?
3) Your are focusing on the marketing and token price, but what news have you of the engine development?
Colin Pape
CEO
Right now, @presearch is our main community interface, though we will build these tools directly into Presearch in the future.
Yes, there are many people who’ve attempted to just farm / mine tokens, and we’ve had to implement measures to prevent that as it really decreases the quality of our traffic and introduces valueless inflation into rewards. We haven’t had many issues for the past 6 months after rolling out our new system though.
The actual engine development in the near future will largely focus on API integrations and community packages. https://github.com/PresearchOfficial/presearch-packages
The open source search engine is a long-term project and we need to have usage and the tokenomics figured out first so that we have the resources to attract the talent and computing power we need to build the actual search index.
Cryptodiffer TEAM
Thank you everyone for your questions! Great as always!
Thank you Collin for your time, it is pleasure to have you in our chat. Really great job!!
Colin Pape
CEO
Thanks, Maks! Really appreciate the opportunity! So many great questions! 🙂
I’ll keep hanging out and answering as many as I can until my next appointment…
Regarding the ones I’ve already answered, I’ll probably stop replying to everyone to say ‘answered’ though as it’s taking a lot of time to go back and forth through the list.
