Presearch.com, Decentralized Search Engine

[Presearch]

Greetings all! We’re Presearch, a decentralized metasearch engine. We want to reach more people to give more privacy tools. Here’s what we do, let us know your thoughts.

Presearch is a decentralized metasearch engine that routes search queries through a globally distributed network of nodes to anonymize and detach the user from the query.

The project is designed to eliminate centralized data collection, prevent behavioral profiling, and resist censorship or surveillance.

Presearch protects you from 1) centralized surveillance (search query logging), 2) behavioral profiling, 3) government subpoenas/data requests.

Presearch is not an anonymity network (use with Tor/VPN for enhanced privacy).

Here are the search providers used: https://docs.presearch.io/presearch-engine/metasearch

The website itself https://presearch.com and more documentation https://docs.presearch.io.

We believe that as it is now and as we continue to iterate on the product, searching on Presearch will be truly private as other search engines falsely advertise, and easy for people of wide privacy backgrounds to take advantage of the service.

Let us know your thoughts… they’re immensely valuable to us.

[Bhaelros]

I did a simple search test and here are the results. I think results speak for themselves.

Your site

Brave search

Google search

Bing

[ph00lt0 (Mare Polaris)]

I got nsfw ads on this website…
Seems sketchy af.

[Presearch]

Yes, you have the choice to toggle NSFW mode on or off, which you may have toggled.

Whether the user wants to see those ads is up to them.

[ph00lt0 (Mare Polaris)]

I dont have any switch touched. Anyway it seems your website also shows ads for illegal online casino’s. So those are my thoughts sketch af.

[Presearch]

@ph00lt0

I dont have any switch touched. Anyway it seems your website also shows ads for illegal online casino’s. So those are my thoughts sketch af.

Totally understand.

We take a more open approach to advertising, giving companies and creators, especially those restricted on other platforms, a place to reach their audience. We know it’s not for everyone, but some users actively seek out this kind of content, and we aim to be a respectful option for them.

Importantly, Presearch provides a private way to search, so if someone is looking for adult content, let’s say, they can do so without it being logged, tracked, or tied to their identity; with some peace of mind.

@Bhaelros

I did a simple search test and here are the results. I think results speak for themselves.

I tried really hard to presume what you were implying, but I wasn’t successful

If you spell it out for me I can give a response.

[Bhaelros]

Look at the page layout and ads. Also, search results are not as good as others. Especially Google is providing better results. I did all the searches within the same Brave browser, using same Brave Shields config.

[Presearch]

Gotcha, thank you.

On results:
The results might feel more polished because of a centralized index and subtle source ranking, but that comes at the cost of trusting one company’s judgment and potential data mixing.

Presearch is giving you the results that come before assumptions.

Presearch gives true user control and privacy, and we’re building an independent search index that will give you the best of both experiences.

At the end of the day, the objective is to protect user data. Brave cannot guarantee that. We can.

For layout and ads:
I have to once again ask for you to give me your explicit thoughts … what’re you thinking?

[Presearch]

And I’ll put this in a reply to me, but some use cases for Presearch’s results:

One searcher was struggling to access public records due to location-based search filtering, and turned to Presearch. They discovered that Presearch’s decentralized approach delivered global results that other engines no longer did. It became a vital tool for uncovering obscured information, particularly around government transparency, and restored their access to less biased data that they had been blinded to elsewhere online.

Another user had spent years trying to find a specific image. Success only came when she tried Presearch, suggesting that other platforms had scrubbed or buried the content.

This is information that otherwise be hidden, filtered, or out of reach if not using Presearch.

[RegularOracle]

Like the other poster, I find this doesn’t look clean because of all the ads. The bigger issue is that this setup feels insecure and lacks privacy. It’s too easy to click on the ads, many of which look sketchy, and that’s dangerous because those links can hide malware, direct you to phishing sites to steal your login or financial details, or lure you into scams.Also, seeing that your privacy policy hasn’t been updated since June 1st, 2022, doesn’t build confidence.

[Presearch]

@RegularOracle Thank you so much. Some of this is immediately fixable, others longer-term.

But all definitely addressable, and because of your input so I thank you gratefully.

[RegularOracle]

While the interface looks somewhat better with uBlock Origin installed using base settings, the cryptocurrency integration continues to make me a bit uncomfortable, particularly because they don’t appear to be widely recognized coins. Regarding search results, a cursory glance reveals little noticeable difference between Presearch and DuckDuckGo, my primary search engine. Duck Assist, however, seems preferable as it doesn’t require wallet funds for use.

With uBlock Origin

[overdrawn98901]

SearXNG is an AGPL licensed meta search engine that has multiple instances running by the community along with plenty of integrations and the ability to self host. Presearch does not have AGPL licensed server code from what I can find.

In terms of privacy, Mullvad Leta + SearXNG is just better from what I see. It’s not perfect, as Leta is minimal, and SearXNG instances get blocked easily. But I can self host SearXNG today and can validate code running on other instances. Leta already has reputation because of Mullvad. This these two generally protect against all of the things you say you are protecting against.

If you are suggesting that your service still needs to be accessed via Tor / VPN for anonymity, then I don’t know what the decentralizations strategy does for an end user that SearXNG doesn’t solve by accessing it with Tor / VPN. It’s either trusting Presearch the company, Mullvad whose been in the game and trusted for a while, or a SearXNG instance operator.

I’d like to be sold on why I should bother switching when I have these two options together.

—

Some additional questions to help with the above. Perhaps these are in your docs, but these seem very relevant for discussion here as part of discovery for readers:

Is Presearch doing its own indexing atop the integrations, or what other advantages are there compared to SearXNG / Leta accessed via Tor? Are your integrations through official channels or scraped like SearXNG?

Does Presearch plan on licensing their server side code as AGPL, or another FOSS license? Or did I miss the repo.

If it’s decentralized, and there are nodes, are the nodes run by the community? Is this also AGPL licensed? What query metadata is propagated through the nodes?

Aside from ads, how does Presearch make money? Do you get paid for doing specific integrations? I ask the latter as there are a suspicious number of crypto integrations built in. Are you a VC backed company? Do you get paid for click through rates with integrations?

EDIT: this isn’t to say I’m against it, but Im highly skeptical of companies providing free-ish services that say they respect privacy without a clear conversion plan. There’s a bottom line somewhere, and it must be reached. If that bottom line is Malware ads - fine, I can live with that. However, uBlock will catch up and block them, and the privacy crowd all has this installed - how will money be made? How will this service be maintained?

[overdrawn98901]

More questions:

Who are your parent or subsidiary organizations that you’d need to share information to? What information do you share with partners? What aggregated and anonymized data do you share with others for public data sets? Why do I need to attach a blockchain wallet to Presearch and transfer through it? What is the concept of earning tokens for searching?

[faxe]

Hey, thanks for the product showcase. The following feedback is purely based on some quick testing from a “normal browser user” perspective and does not take your decentralized approach into account since I have yet to check out the docs.

First of all I’d like to say that the search results (for the few topics I searched) were quite good for me for casual browsing. Can’t yet tell how this relates to doing deeper research on a topic. Also I’m personally not a fan of the choice of the ad topics (crypto, gambling, etc.) but that’s your choice and others might be okay with it.

As for the browsing experience, it feels very cluttered. I use Brave with shields set to agressively block trackers and ads and to block fingerprinting and third party cookies (usually I also block scripts, but I changed that for testing purposes).

For example in this screenshot, everything outside of the red rectangle is more or less useless (except maybe also the menu button) but is dominantly displayed and adds distraction. I might be stupid, but I didn’t find a way to turn any of this off within the menu. The links to your socials and crypto stuff etc. add no value to the search and should not be stealing the focus of the results. And this is after setting Brave shields to agressively block ads and trackers, since it’s way worse without that (even with disabled backgrounds).

I wanted to disable javascript to enhance the experience, but that’s not possible. I also find it quite ironic that this search engine can’t show search results without javascript, but surely can display ads on the main search page.

For comparison here are also some screenshots of how competiting search engines look without javascript and the same brave shield settings.

Conclusion

With brave search, ddg and leta I personally have no real use for presearch. The main selling point seems to be the decentralization, for which I have yet to check out the docs, but I doubt that it will outweight the cons of the user interface for the average search engine user and even for most of the people here. I really hope you reconsider removing all the crypto and gambling stuff and creating a clean search (and maybe also an even sleeker one that works without javascript) before thinking about how you can add ads without adding too much distraction. As of now, with the default experience with backgrounds, all the small ads and links and the “ADVERTISE WITH US” button prominently displayed, it feels more like an advertisement platform that also does search and not the other way around.

edit: hope I caught all typos

[Mossturtlecoffee]

I had a Presesearch account several years ago which I had deleted. Some time later I started getting spam on the email alias I was using.

[Valynor]

@Presearch

We take a more open approach to advertising, giving companies and creators, especially those restricted on other platforms, a place to reach their audience.

I would like to rephrase that into:

“We don’t care about serving ads to our customers that are deliberately designed (in the case of Online Casinos) to draw them into addiction and financial debt.”

I don’t condone such business ethics and I would never recommend Presearch to anyone because of it.

[Lukas (Lukas Dutovas)]

I agree, gambling ads are completely unacceptable.

[Encounter5729]

@Presearch

Presearch is a decentralized metasearch engine that routes search queries through a globally distributed network of nodes to anonymize and detach the user from the query.

If it is decentralized, then it means you aren’t the only one hosting the nodes. Then where is the Git repo?

[Encounter5729]

Must say, news search is quite good.