A ‘Private Google’ That Keeps You Anonymous Launches To Take On Search Goliath

Having already accumulated 3.8 million registered users and 150 million monthly searches in beta, Presearch, a new decentralized search engine has officially entered the Mainnet, providing a private alternative to rival the industry’s giant: Google.

“In a world where one company controls 92% of the search engine market and the flow of information for billions of people, there’s a clear need for a decentralized, Web3 alternative,” explained Colin Pape, Founder of Presearch. 

“Presearch offers a community-run alternative to centrally-controlled search engines like Google, DuckDuckGo, and Brave,” he added.

Back in 2018, the technology company had been fined €4.24 billion (US$4.56 billion) by the European Commission for unfairly using its Android operating system to boost its search engine dominance. 

Google then agreed to make changes to the default settings on the platform, changing the default search engine on all its smartphones to Presearch, leading to a huge surge in downloads of the app on Android phones.

Instead of using a centralized computing infrastructure that belongs to just one firm, this search engine runs on multiple nodes spanning thousands of community-run computers, allowing it to harness decentralized computing resources to power the network, and anonymize all searches and results. 

With every successful search query processed, these node operators receive a sum of the company’s PRE cryptocurrency, allowing them to “earn” value just like typical Bitcoin miners would.

“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,” summed up Trey Grainger, CTO at Presearch.

[via PC Mag and Presearch / PR Newswire, cover image via Presearch]