TORONTO – Presearch, the private, decentralized search engine with 3.8 million registered users and 150 million monthly searches, today announced its Mainnet launch, shifting all search traffic to run on its decentralized network of community-run nodes.
Rather than using centralized computing infrastructure that is fully controlled by one company, Presearch runs on nodes distributed on computers run by thousands of community members all around the world. These nodes provide the decentralized computing resources required to power the network, privately running anonymized queries and returning results for incoming searches.
“In a world where one company controls 92 percent of the search engine market and the flow of information for billions of people, there’s a clear need for a decentralized, Web3 alternative,” said Colin Pape, Founder of Presearch. “Presearch offers a community-run alternative to centrally-controlled search engines like Google, DuckDuckGo, and Brave. Today’s Mainnet launch is a major milestone for the Presearch community and for the future of search.”
In 2018, Google was fined 4.24 billion euro by the European Commission for unfairly using Android to solidify its search engine dominance. Google agreed to make changes to its default settings, making Presearch a default search engine option on all Android devices across the U.K. and Europe in 2021. Nearly 70% of smartphone owners in Europe use Android, which helped lead to a significant increase in Presearch downloads on Android devices.
Now the leader in decentralized search, Presearch has built a growing network of 65,000 nodes run by community operators to power its Testnet search engine. Today’s launch marks the transition of the platform’s significant traffic over to this decentralized network of nodes as they migrate from Testnet (early testing) to Mainnet (production). The decentralized network will now process over 5 million daily private searches with the ability to scale to hundreds of millions.
Node operators are rewarded with Presearch’s PRE cryptocurrency for each successful query they process, enabling them to capture a piece of the value of the network, similar to how Bitcoin miners earn BTC when they process financial transactions on that network.
The current node software supports the collection of information from external sources, and future updates will enable nodes to perform additional functions including web crawling, indexing, distributed storage, training AI models, and other tasks to power the search engine.
“Instead of a few companies acting as gatekeepers controlling information access for the whole world, Presearch is pioneering a better future where search algorithms can be built and run openly by anyone, vetted by everyone, and where choice and control is given back to those using the search engine,” said Trey Grainger, Presearch CTO. “We’re grateful to the Presearch community for enabling this important milestone as we all launch the Presearch Mainnet together.”
To learn more about the Mainnet launch, visit the Presearch blog. Presearch’s search engine is available on desktop or smartphone via Google Play or the Apple App Store.
Source: Presearch
