Can you elaborate on your business model, especially since advertisers can “bet” on keywords with a token system? I am concerned that the relevance of advertisements can take a darker turn as mentioned by the rest of the community.
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Reading and will be getting to everyone’s responses, thank you all.
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I gave Presearch a try and actually like it. The results are the same as DuckDuckGo which I use. I do have some quick questions though:
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What is the difference between the NSFW Mode and Safe Search settings? They seem the same to me.
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Do you or will you have a way to save the settings similar to DuckDuckGo? For example, I can save my settings within a link in my bookmark like this: %s at DuckDuckGo ← (Hover over with your mouse pointer to see the complete link)
Other options DuckDuckGo offers are to save your settings as a json file or see the settings in cookie data.
Additional info:
- Questions from previous posters are extremely important to me to be sure that your service is indeed privacy oriented. I too use uBlock so I’m not worried about the ads as they can be taken care of on my end (everyone takes privacy seriously here so I’m sure you understand we all have tools that will be used to assure privacy). Hopefully your web site will rise above but until then, I’ll wait for your answers and what the community recommends.
Dug into the engine a few months ago to potentially add it to my self-hosted searXNG instance. I think the entanglement w/ crypto makes it hard to see the product seriously. Also, this gave me pause from the privacy policy:
We may share transient information with trusted partners during a particular request, for purposes of providing the Service. This may include trusted advertising providers who contractually agree to delete the information after the request is completed so that it is not stored.
Can you speak to what data is shared with ‘trusted advertising partners’?
Have to get to these sporadically in small batches – apologies, can’t do it all at once.
I’ll address the crypto more in a future post… but understandable. Because of this forum we’re leaning toward changing the AI search result to have free answers populate (most of the world expects this by now) without the need to stake to use.
Now for the crypto rewards, none of that is needed to continue searching in private.
A lot of people found value in having a monetary reward for searching, instead of Google monetizing your data (and others storing it), and digital assets were optimal versus fiat. Maybe we think that out as well, but most importantly its for punishing bad behavior for nodes.
edit: For results – At the moment I can’t speak for DDG’s engine (I’ll come back to you with some answers, but they’re no doubt findable) but our results right now are the least biased and assumptions. Again, some people like their internet service knowing and assuming everything about them to suggest some cool shoes. Others want a very direct answer based on their query, and without those queries and data being stored for entities to get into if they’re powerful enough.
And if you don’t want to be rewarded but still use the privacy and direct results that other engines don’t give, you don’t have to anything but search.
You’re next @overdrawn98901…
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Still here… still overdrawn next. 
Appreciate everyone, again. Will get to it.
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Presearch was acquired by a new team less than two years ago. We are working to make the project more open, including deciding on correct licensing.
Presearch nodes are decentralized, run by the community. Nodes earn PRE tokens for being available and for processing searches on a network of over 40,000 nodes. This architecture ensures that no single entity controls user data, reducing the risk of centralized data breaches or profiling. Each search is routed anonymously through this network, enhancing user privacy by design. However, the rest of the project is centralized; the team is currently working to remedy that. Presearch is currently scraping while we develop our own proprietary index.
We are designing a new, fully decentralized search index. We are looking for interested community members to participate (those with search, decentralization and AI experience). This will be an open source project.
A more user-friendly interface may appeal to those who prefer a more straightforward setup compared to self-hosting SearXNG instances. The other search engines (that you might see listed on PG) have your data for governments to take or hackers to breach. Presearch does not.
Money through selling ads, but never profiling users on the site to track them for personalization. As well as staking for keywords and affiliates in search results; these search results are always organic and not irrelevant long-tail and adjacent… always exactly what you’re searching for. Currently raising via Wefunder and external means to stay alive. Again, some people love personalized ads. Those who hate them can use Presearch…
…and re: registration/blockchain, you don’t have to set up a wallet if you don’t want compensation for searching, or have no interest in running a node for compensation. You can search without your data being tacked or being profiled for hyper-personal ads that advertisers might value more.
Those running ad-blockers, and not paying for ad-free version, will probably not be helping the service’s money-making.
So:
Who are your parent or subsidiary organizations that you’d need to share information to?
Technically no parents, however investors are somewhat like parents: We share high level financials with them.
Subsidiares?
None.
What information do you share with partners?
- Presearch Takeover Ads advertising partners: number of impressions per ad, number of clicks per ad, number of searches by geography, number of searches on homepage/search page, mobile/desktop, searches per browser type
- Affiliate advertising partners: first three octets of IP for geolocation, browser type
- To be clear, if you select on an advertiser’s ad and go to their website, we have no control over what they collect
What aggregated and anonymized data do you share with others for public data sets?
None.
Why do I need to attach a blockchain wallet to Presearch and transfer through it?
For PRE token transfers, like the majority of digital asset transfers, you need to provide a blockchain wallet to send or receive tokens. Not needed if you just want private search.
What is the concept of earning tokens for searching?
Incentivize and reward usage of a service that monetizes with non-data intrusive methods. It’s hard to break a habit for most people, but that habit that a majority of the world has comes at the cost of data privacy.
Do you get paid for doing specific integrations? I ask the latter as there are a suspicious number of crypto integrations built in.
Please provide some specifics regarding “there are a suspicious number of crypto integrations built in." There’s a few instances you might be referring to, either search providers that are crypto-related or the icons that show the native asset information on different platforms. Probably the latter? No payment for those.
Are you a VC backed company?
Yes
Do you get paid for click through rates with integrations?
It depends upon the advertiser. We get paid for the number of impressions for an ad, the click through rates of an ad and/or actual signups/subscriptions/purchases derived from someone clicking on an ad.
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Next on the priority list!
Well, I don’t think anyone in this forum uses browsers and internet without tracker and ad protection.
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That’s quite alright.
Hmmm, are these two at odds with each other? A proprietary index means closed source, but you also say it’s open source.
But thanks for answering the questions in detail. I’m quite happy to see new competition in the custom indexed search engine market - we desperately need it.
Let’s not spread FUD however. Not all users are facing threat models of government dipping into search data, and non-government hackers getting search engine data is also quite a specific threat model to secure against. We also don’t know Presearch is resistant to government threats until it happens.
While I praise Monero for being anonymous, Crypto in general is also highly correlated with scams. This is not to say Presearch is a scam, but the higher usage of crypto integrations for any reason brings skepticism among many.
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Final question, is there documentation on how I can setup a Presearch node myself?
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Feel free to reach out to this account in DM as well. Node Setup Instructions | Presearch Docs
Another vote for presearch here.
I think I have devised a good test for search engines.
Try and find specific things deemed antisemitic such as; what speech is at the end of Ye’s song (HH), and all of the engines failed miserably except presearch. So I now know that brave is failing.
Oh, that’s actually interesting. Will have to test this for myself (putting aside the ads).
Brave, Google, DuckDuckGo are all suceeding in my test when querying “what speech is at the end of Ye’s song”
All of them showed articles about the song for me. I might have to think of other topics that are often censored. But isn’t that what Tor is potentially used for?
Yes it appears they are working now! so presearch was merely faster -somehow.
When using Presearch without an account are there any restrictions (e.g. x searches per day)? It seems to work fine without account but there’s lots of nudging towards logging in.
Hey all. Still going to go in order here, but when the quick Q’s pop up I’m compelled to reply:
No restrictions without an account.
…
Jeez, overdrawn was 20 days ago.
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