They seemed really sketchy, and this community was critical of them Presearch.com, Decentralized Search Engine
My biggest complaint of them was the extensive amount of ADs. But they tried to build an easy to use decentralized search engine, unlike Yacy.
Maybe still standing search engines should be more decentralized like Presearch was
Fun fact: Back in 2023 I had a video call with CMO and VP of Business Development of Presearch
I never trusted Presearch because when it first rose to prominence, it had the word “blockchain” everywhere (example). I never understood why search needed blockchain technology. It looks like my skepticism was justified, as checking the current website now says “AI” instead. They just pivoted from one buzzword to another.
What we inherited included significant reputational challenges, an unsustainable token model, limited monetization, and a complex, bloated infrastructure that was extremely expensive to operate. Both the Web2 and Web3 technology stacks required extensive work simply to stabilize the platform, let alone improve it.
Web3 often seemed to be a solution looking for a problem. If we wanna say what web3 should look like, I’d say it’s E2EE, but the current coinage (pun intended) is cryptocurrency jankiness. Given crypto currencies are littered with bad reputation with scams, it sucks but I’m not surprised Presearch couldn’t hit a good target audience.
Buzzword hopping. Get the crypto crowd. Ok that didn’t work now get the AI first crowd.
I took it as a suspicious way to pay node runners
Having a big network of residential IPs, or even VPSs for the matter, is a valuable resource. Even just for scraping Google… practically impossible to block. And this mitigated the blocking SearX(NG) instances experience
The question is if the PRE coin had any real value and how sustainable it was. As we see, likely not very sustainable.
I’d rather bet on goodness in people to help the project without money gains. People do run Tor nodes, SearX(NG) instances, XMR nodes or even smaller things like Tor Snowflake extension… just for the appreciation in the project and willingness to help
And for money gains like this there is a big incentive to game the system with sole intention to earn as much as possible while having 0 care for the project.
Btw does anyone know what happened with their index?