Thanks, mcfom!

We're working on a demo video that will show how it works.

In the meantime, we have a new intro video that is being released here for the first time:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0By4OtERHxS-wQWIyclUtdzlrV0k/view

Any thoughts?

And yes, ironic that the producer is hosting it on Google Drive. Their tentacles are deep and far-reaching!

disconnectme - I agree that not everything needs to be decentralized. There's no sense in doing it just for the sake of decentralization.

However, seeing that Google is the biggest source of centralization of information in the history of the world, we feel that this is a very important project that could really benefit humanity.

Yes, others have definitely tried and failed to take on Google, including Bing as you mentioned. And it certainly will not be an easy challenge, however, we think that with Presearch's go-to-market strategy, product offering, and token-based incentivization model, the odds are better than in previous efforts.

The supply of tokens is limited, and all sponsorships / advertising on the platform will require the purchase of tokens to run.

Thanks, scribbles! We believe this is a worthwhile project as well.

It sounds like using Presearch is going to make your life a lot easier in the short term, as it's the easiest way to switch between Google and DuckDuckGo.

Eventually, we believe that we'll be able to make a fully-decentralized search engine using IPFS and DHT. There are some elements that will need to be created - ex. a caching layer for speed, and a node-based voting / ranking model - but in time, it is theoretically possible and we're as motivated as anyone to make it happen!

To start, we're rolling out an easier way to switch between search engines, and we're building a community around the need for an open, transparent search engine. We'd love to have you join us!

Also, please refer to the translations thread and contact us - we are interested in a Dutch translation.

Cryptorials - please don't give up on us yet.

Our team is in the process of updating their LinkedIn profiles. Most of us have worked together on another project.

The new white paper is now online at https://www.presearch.io/uploads/WhitePaper.pdf

Building a fully-decentralized search engine is a massive undertaking, and we see it being accomplished in steps, with the first step being this highly-usable search tool that we can build usage, value and community around.

Please let me know if you have any questions.

Thanks!

Colin

Thanks, 2girls for looking on the bright side.

We're not going anywhere and are committed to bringing this project to life.

We've had a great response from the broader community, including from one of the original founders of Ethereum and the manager of a large crypto fund.

We've sold out our initial pre-sale already and are now wrapping up the second part of our pre-sale ahead of the July 25th public sale.

Hi Gandalf,

We are newer to this world of cryptocurrency in a sense, though we opened up the ability for the merchants on our ShopCity.com platform to accept payment in Bitcoin back in 2013. Unfortunately, we didn't stumble across BitcoinTalk until much later, so we're just cutting our chops here.

We have a good idea of where the project should go, and some very innovative UIs and technology in the works, but feel that the main gap in Google's armour is its lack of transparency. For Presearch to be fully transparent, it needs to be open to community input. There are so many smart, skilled people out there who would contribute to an initiative like this, but they need a framework and that initial momentum, which is what we will provide with Presearch.

Looking forward to your feedback as the project evolves.

All the best!

Colin

virasog - In our case, the announcement accidentally went out when we were first getting organized. We had some great questions come up and didn't want to delete the thread, but needed to stay focused so we could get things rocking.

Really appreciate everyone's patience and understanding!

And thank you, for keeping the conversation going, Gandalf.

We will definitely link this pre-announcement thread in the official announcement.

One thing to note before I answer your questions is that the launch date that we have up on our website (June 27th) has been pushed out to July 25th.

Right now we are planning on using a fixed price token model for a few reasons:

• For the sake of clarity for purchasers / customers and their ability to budget (as you mentioned)
• We have priced it in the pre-sale already and have great momentum happening there right now
• As tokens will be used as part of the go-to-market strategy we have designed some plans around specific amounts, and we want to be able to sell the tokens actively to ensure that the start-up budget is available; it's much easier to sell something with a fixed price
• Because we are going to allow for payment in multiple cryptocurrencies, we are denoting the price in USD at the time of the sale

That said, we haven't locked in the price or number of tokens 100% yet, and are weighing the value of doing multiple token sales rather than one larger one.

We will keep you and everyone else posted as we get everything 100% locked in over the next couple of days.

In the meantime, we'd love your feedback, and that of anyone else reading.

We are leaning toward 1 billion tokens, which some have objected to.

The primary reason for doing this is that we believe that for the sake of semantics and how we refer to our tokens within the consensus, reward, sponsor and node ecosystems, we'd rather be referring to 'x DSTs' as far as pricing, incentives, contributions, etc., goes, rather than fractional values or $-denominated values.

Therefore, we'd need at least a billion of them to fulfill at least the first stage of the project. I haven't heard of 'splitting' tokens yet, and it sounds like it isn't particularly feasible: https://ethereum.stackexchange.com/questions/11612/smart-contract-for-company-stock/11615 (though that may have changed recently and I'm unaware). It's possible that even the 1 billion contemplated may not be enough to allow for whole DSTs throughout the life of the project, but we'll have to cross that bridge at some point. It's possible that we may need multiple types of tokens, along with the ability to exchange them as well.

It is a massive opportunity and the search space is currently the largest and most valuable Internet use case at the moment.


Sorry, please allow me to clarify.

At some point, yes, it is likely node-based. To start the token will primarily be used for the reward, voting / consensus, sponsorship platform. But when it goes totally decentralized from decentral-ish (especially compared to Google!), likely using some combination of a blockchain and IPFS https://ipfs.io/ index, and incorporate nodes, there will be an incentive provided.

The primary value conferred on DSTs will be from sponsors. That value should provide sufficient compensation to those running Presearch nodes.


When I wrote 'advertisements', I should have been more clear and termed it 'sponsorships' which is how we refer to them internally. We don't like advertisements either, especially the way Google currently does them, somewhat confusingly within organic search results.

The genesis for Presearch was a 'skunkworks' project we hacked together and have used internally for the past few years. I coded that version myself mainly.

In this version there's no index, and it's a pretty basic interface that enables the searcher to choose to directly search a known database using an icon.

As such, there isn't a ton of room for advertisements or sponsorships.

Something we've been contemplating though is the use of autosuggest sponsorships along these lines:



(Unfortunately, I can't post inline images as a newbie account. Also, this is not what the actual version will look like, it's just a quick hack mockup.)

I've always liked the 'brought to you by' model, and believe that we can create significant value for sponsors at the keyword level, and at the overall site level.

Similar to the BAT model, the user will have the option of viewing / clicking through to a sponsor's website and will be compensated for doing so via DSTs.

I'm a big believer in domains from a branding, security and intuitiveness standpoint, and we've discussed limiting the entity name to a domain to avoid confusion and make it as secure as possible for the user, knowing exactly which URL they are clicking through to.

Click / impression fraud is a huge concern of course, and this is something we are working on right now. We have some pretty crafty ways that we think we'll be able to increase relevance, ensure sponsorships are fair and also minimize fraud / maximize engagement.

At some point, it'll likely make sense to run our own index to minimize our reliance on Google, but perhaps we'll just partner with DuckDuckGo as they get better and better and search. We haven't been in touch with them at all yet.

Gandalf, I'd welcome your thoughts on whether something like this sponsorship model would be palatable / appealing to you. Same with anyone else reading.


I'm not going to BS you. This is not going to be easy.

A lot of searches are doing through the browser bar without accessing Google.com these days. We haven't been able to find any stats, but I would assume it's the majority.

Google is damn good at search, and it would be really, really hard to top their general results. That's why we've left them as the default engine option; it really minimizes the impact on the user while enabling them to switch to Presearch.

In particular, we believe there's a specific demographic of people for whom this will have value and who would switch:

• Web workers who spend a lot of time on a laptop / desktop (devs, designers, admins, marketers, content producers, etc.) and are always online.
• People who deep-search specific databases on a regular basis in particular
• People who want to earn crypto tokens
• People who are concerned about Google's search dominance

The crypto group of let's call it 5-10 million people would be the initial potential user base.

The crypto and Google-wary aspect of the user base is actually secondary, opening up the market to significantly more people - likely well over 100m globally.

This user base will also expand as we partner with browser makers to power their search fields, as well as third-party websites.

The great thing about this user base is that while it may not be as large as the general population, it is a group that is likely savvy enough to actually set the site as their home page, and who will experience enough benefit from being able to deep search specific databases without first having to Google the name of the resource (ex. Twitter) and then run a second query on that service. It's also an influential and affluent group in general.

We also plan to reach out to the domain name owner (domainer) community, as they have a ton of highly-targeted, but under-monetized traffic that we could plug into. I have significant contacts in the space, going back a number of years:

https://www.google.com/search?q=colin%20pape%20dnjournal

And also within the local media space (which is under heavy assault by Google and also has a significant volumes of search traffic / usage):

https://www.google.com/search?q=colin%20pape%20local

There are a ton of other potential partners with significant traffic that could benefit from a new monetization model as well.

Setting up these kinds of revenue-sharing partnerships is where I see smart contracts really being valuable.

Being able to audit the actual tracking / remuneration a publisher is receiving, and see the actual wallets / addresses / balances and the flow of funds would be huge for them. Transparency for once.

We talk about the blockchain as being 'trustless', but between partners it's actually as close to 100% trusted as possible, which is a huge breakthrough.

So we will definitely leverage this huge opportunity to be totally transparent with partners and build a massive network of properties that integrate the Presearch field and autosuggestions w/ sponsors.

Not sure if I should be sharing this specific go-to-market strategy - my closed source business background says to keep this private - but the open source nature of the project and the funding mechanism and quality of this community says to share away. Please correct me if what I'm doing here is wrong / dumb.



I totally hear you.

We really aren't thinking so much of ways to make it fancy, but more useful and user-friendly.

For instance, we believe that there are a number of different workflows that are fairly common across different types of web workers, so we plan to make the resources that Presearch searches customizable, with a number of standard options pre-populated based on the type of user.

We will launch a few ways the tool can be easily customized to be highly-functional.

This will include the ability to easily add a custom engine and specific URL parameters to enable deep searching.

The ability to hide sponsors would be possible, and the potential reward for choosing / displaying sponsored ads should be incentive enough.

At the end of the day, we're initially appealing to people who care enough to change search interfaces and set this as their homepage. This is a power-user demographic, and if we can get them to switch, we believe the search volume could be quite significant.

Before we actually build a full index, we'd be building our auto-suggest index, and there are many opportunities around access to this data as well.

Looking forward to your thoughts on our plans and to any suggestions you might have.

Thanks again for commenting!

Colin

A bunch of the merchants on our ShopCity.com platform accept Bitcoin.

What would be amazing would be for some of the major point of sale systems (ex. Vend or LightSpeed) to integrate crypto / BTC. That could be huge.

Our lawyer accepts payment in Bitcoin.

Sorry for the delay, Gandalf86.

To be totally transparent, I was hoping this thread may fade away, as it was launched accidentally and not in the manner that was intended (we had a mix-up on the to-do list and Sherry went ahead and posted this announcement prematurely). After the proper one was up, I was going to pull in the questions received on this thread and ensure they were answered.

I appreciate your interest and am happy that you care enough about this project to follow up! That's awesome!

1. Yes, we will likely need to implement our own coin to run the actual blockchain index, to minimize both bloat and costs. It is something we are considering, but feel that launching an ETH token for the consensus / reward / advertising functions is the best way to go. At that stage of development, we anticipate that the community will be actively involved in strategy and development.

2. Users will be able to spend DSTs on advertising / promotion (it will drive the Adwords-like, but open and unobtrusive ad platform). Opening up different types of features and ability to customize the system is a great idea, and one we can definitely refine further and incorporate into the road map in more detail - we'd love any thoughts that you have. We have some early ideas about customizations that could be offered - more on the visual side and ability to activate different personalization options. There's also a great opportunity around data and ability to mine it for insight.

3. At this stage, we see that the revenue / incentives will be primarily on the advertiser side. They will pay for the opportunity to be discovered 'outside' of the natural results. These fees can be directed to reward the nodes. The key to launch the project is to get consumer usage first, which is why we're launching it as more of a search tool that will direct people to existing indexes (ex. Google, DuckDuckGo, Twitter, Facebook, etc.). Once we have usage and can start collecting data, we'll be in a much better position to architect the interface (we're thinking it won't be in the traditional '10 blue links' format) and index / relevance model.

4. We are researching YaCy as well as some other open models to determine if there are synergies and learnings. We are also engaging with the few other people who have started search engines in an attempt to compete with the big 3 to learn from their experiences.

5. As I mentioned above, this announcement and some of the timelines were announced prematurely. The project is in development, and this thread was not meant to go out until we are ready. We're taking this early feedback to heart and will ensure the project gets off on a great footing in the near future.

To answer your questions though, Presearch has already completed a meaningful pre-sale of tokens, and the ShopCity.com team that is working on the project is being compensated through that company, which is established (17 years in total, 76,000 business members, millions in revenue) and profitable.

6. The token pre-sale is happening outside of an ICO experience, and the overall model is evolving.

I guess the bright side to this accidental early release is that we are learning and growing right in public. We had considered just deleting it, but due to the great early questions felt that it would be a disservice to everyone involved already.

I appreciate your continued interest and welcome you to continue to partake in this thread, and on the official one when we properly announce it.

Thanks!

Colin

To start, we will make it available on the general web to any user.

The ethereum token model will be used to incentivize usage, contribution to and promotion of the site / platform, as well as for the advertising system.

Eventually, we envision a totally decentralized version that would run entirely on the blockchain, but as of right now, it likely isn't possible / feasible. At that point, the community would be driving the development of the platform, and I'm sure with the collective brainpower, we'll be able to come up with something.

It would be so liberating to have a decentralized and open search engine. As an entrepreneur, and researcher who has gone down the rabbit hole (judging by your NWC handle, I assume you have as well), I struggle with Google's censoring or selective displaying of results.

I fear for the clampdown when push comes to shove, and the whole 'fake news' thing is scary. A lot of what is deemed to be fake could very well be true (but inconvenient and anti-establishment), and a lot of what is true is nothing more than propaganda and/or distractions.

Would appreciate your input as Presearch develops...

Hey NewWorldCoiner,

The early private beta of the search tool and user portal is being built on:

Amazon's Web Services Cloud,
LAMP stack,
CodeIgniter PHP framework,
and the web3.js library to communicate with the Ethereum blockchain
Our token is going to be an ERC 20 standard

This stack would definitely not work for the actual search engine, but by the time we get to that stage, hopefully we'll have a significant community of people, much smarter than me and our current team, to make the best choices about how to tackle this massive challenge / opportunity.

At that point, development of the platform and its features will be entirely up to the community of developers who wish to support the project.

Hi 55Domains,

Appreciate the comment. Totally agree with you and love that you brought up the dot com!

This is the first time we've ever not used a dot com for a project.

In our ShopCity.com company, we actually own 8,000 .coms, including ShopBoston.com, ShopNewYork.com, ShopMiami.com, etc. that we are slowly building out in a franchise-like model.

For marketing purposes, if you're not running a .com or the CCTLD, you're at a huge disadvantage. Using anything less for real world marketing leaves you totally dependent on Google. And the leakage for a non-.com can be huge.

The example that stands out to me was when Overstock.com switched to O.co thinking it was shorter and more brandable.

They had to switch back after millions in costs because they were losing something like 60% of their traffic as people assumed it was O.com (which doesn't actually exist - it's reserved by ICANN), and when they went there, nothing appeared so they thought the Overstock site was broken. Oops. Might want to rethink that strategy before you change the name of a stadium in Oakland... ;-)

Anyway, for this project, the .io domain is really only for the project info site.

For whatever reason, using alt-domains doesn't seem to be hurting projects too much in the ICO process at least. I guess because the audience is super-savvy.

When we actually release the public site, it'll be on a .com... I think you'll like the brand we're going to use.

And yes, challenging Google is pretty daunting. You are totally right.

The fact that you and much of the world has that same 'oh shit' reaction (so did we when we got into a fight with them a few years ago), means they have way too much power, and that's really why this project is so important.

People are scared to challenge them because they are so influential and have so much power. It's probably the most centralized power in the whole world, outside of direct military capability by the USA.

As I just mentioned, we actually battled Google back in 2011, and from that experience, where we fortunately escaped their mass penalization of our platform, they indirectly admitted that they manually penalize sites and then they built out a 'manual action' section of Google Webmaster Tools to cover themselves.

Here's a quote: "Stricker, the Google spokesman, said an earlier automated penalty imposed against ShopCity sites by coincidence had expired at that time, but Google imposed another penalty when it received outside complaints about ShopCity sites. Local partners say they still have high hopes for their network."

From here: http://www.mercurynews.com/2011/07/28/local-business-site-challenges-google-ranking/

And if you go into GWT (now called Search Console), then Search Traffic, then Manual Actions, you'll see the section they created after our incident.

That's why we want to take this challenge on, and why we believe that we can actually be successful here.

We've had an internal site for years that does roughly what our public beta site is going to do, and it's received great usage and been very sticky.

It's just something we hacked together though, and to do it properly and build out the proper beta site will take some work. We're plugging away on it right now.

So yeah, we've definitely thought this over, and we think that, together with the decentralization community, we can make a dent here and provide a way to start turning this massive centralization of the Internet around.

We would appreciate the support of anyone reading, and I am going to be living on this forum for the foreseeable future talking with you guys about how to do it.

Let me know if you want to chat further about domains - it's definitely one of my passions.

Question for everyone:

Should we take this post down and start fresh, or just edit the original post?

This wasn't the way it was planned to be announced, but there's been some valuable discussion here.

Appreciate your thoughts... Thanks!

Thank you, NewWorldCoiner! Appreciate you and others looking out for the community.

Hi baby222,

Yes, it is an ethereum-based token.

Forgive me, but I'm not exactly sure what you mean by the presearch investigation. Could you let me know what you're thinking?

Thanks!

Colin

Thank you, Coin_trader. We will get the information up in this thread ASAP.

Sorry, NewWorldCoiner. Definitely had a mix-up here and certainly didn't intend for this to be our first impression.

You're right, we're definitely new and didn't realize there'd been so many scams...

I've read through a ton of posts for the past few weeks to get the lay of the land, but realize that is nothing compared to those of you who've built this place...

I come from a small town called Midland, in Ontario, Canada...

We locals call people from Toronto who just show up and think they own the place 'citiots'... Sucks that we've come across that way here! :|

I'll get you the exact details on the stack and source code tomorrow morning. I believe I know, but don't want to misspeak and lose more credibility.

Presearch is registered in Canada most of the team is in Canada and the US.

To be clear, this is not an IPO - it's simply a sale of tokens to customers.

We were not planning to hold funds in escrow, but would consider it.

Team tokens cannot be used for 3-6 months.

We recognize that this is a pretty massive undertaking.

We see the first stage being a fairly simple interface that leverages Google and other search engines to minimize resistance to switching to our search field.

I should mention that to start we are targeting desktop searchers, and particularly 'web workers' to start.

Users will be able to earn tokens (DSTs) for using the site (similar to the BAT model) and sharing it / referring people to it.

This stage will also incorporate a basic advertising platform that will enable advertisers to use DSTs to purchase unobtrusive keyword ads.

The next step is building out the full consensus model, enabling the community to guide the direction and features of the platform.

Members will be able to propose, vote on or fund projects, and devs will be compensated for their work, all with DSTs.

Ultimately, we believe the site will become a full search engine with its own index, but at this point there are a number of technologies we're waiting to be developed / proven that we'd need to make it fully decentralized.

To start, we believe that having an open, transparent search engine as an alternative would be a great step toward decentralizing the web.

This will be an open source project, and we can see it spawning a bunch of different search engines as people fork it for different purposes / niches.

At this point, we're looking for feedback and for people to poke holes in the logic so we can iterate.

And yes, we will collect metadata and have discussed a number of ways to make it available to participants.

I really miss the 'olden days' when you could get keyword data that was meaningful, before Google started blocking referrer info and when Google Analytics was Urchin.

Now it's just totally a black box and just about useless.

We'd like to change that and open things up...

Thanks for the great questions! I'll keep you posted on the technical answers.

Colin

Thanks, daddynexxus!

We too feel that it's a worthwhile endeavour. We've experienced firsthand through our other business how much power Google has, and how opaque they are. It's time to switch things up, and we believe we have a way to make it happen.

Prior to discovering cryptocurrency and exchange-traded altcoins a few months ago, I couldn't really see how it would be feasible, but now it's pretty clear to me and my team.

FYI, we're not new to the world of Bitcoin - we just didn't dive as deeply into it as we should have...

Here's an archived version of an announcement we did in 2013 about how we enabled merchants on our ShopCity.com platform to get paid in Bitcoin for instance:

http://web.archive.org/web/20140625225558/http://www.shopcity.com/blog/?postid=10000319

Looking forward to sharing more of our vision and plans with everyone!

Thanks, raven1322!

We'll be posting on www.twitter.com/decentralsearch - not much there yet, but it's coming.