[PRE-ANN] [ICO] [DST] Presearch: Decentralized Search Engine

[lengfeng847]

is this an ETH token ico also ? is the ico to pay for the presearch investigation ?

I have the same question!

[1714773289]

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[1714773289]

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[NewWorldCoiner]

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Well played sir, you handled that well!

Didn't mean to sound harsh, but we see these sorts of announcements all the time. Generally, the poorer they are, the more they look like a scam. Plus, it's getting ridiculous with all these ICO's now, it's not good for the market.

Sounds interesting so far, I'll keep an eye on it.

[colinp]

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Well played sir, you handled that well!

Didn't mean to sound harsh, but we see these sorts of announcements all the time. Generally, the poorer they are, the more they look like a scam. Plus, it's getting ridiculous with all these ICO's now, it's not good for the market.

Sounds interesting so far, I'll keep an eye on it.

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

[colinp]

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!

[55Domains]

Im not quite sure what it is with these Start-ups and launches all being on .io, but your putting big rocks in your way by going with anything other then .com, and im not even going to get started on the "presearch".

Seriously No offense intended but, what do you think will happen if (lets be creative and nice and say IF) you get the attention of Google? I wouldnt even want to "try" and imagine where else your going terrible wrong from the get go, Google is not just going to sit there and let you come along Grabbing a share of their Market, And youll be able to do little to nothing because you you underestimated their power and influence by a very.... very.... Very long shot. Your going up against the Probably most influential Company in the world, I personally think you need to think this one over and once done, please start with a .com... .

[colinp]

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.

[colinp]

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Well played sir, you handled that well!

Didn't mean to sound harsh, but we see these sorts of announcements all the time. Generally, the poorer they are, the more they look like a scam. Plus, it's getting ridiculous with all these ICO's now, it's not good for the market.

Sounds interesting so far, I'll keep an eye on it.

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.

[merle]

Crowdsale Will Begin June 27 2017.  Presearch.io - Presearch is an alternative search engine that rewards community members with DSTs (Decentralized Search Tokens) for their usage, contribution to, and promotion of the platform.  

Tokens can be purchased during the Presearch Decentralized Search Token (DST) crowdsale
Tokens will be issued to early adopters to reward usage and promotion of the platform
Token-holders will be able to vote on decisions, suggest / fund dev projects
Devs will receive tokens for contributing to features / projects
Advertisers will be able to purchase targeted, non-intrusive, keyword sponsorships with DSTs

Please add more details on your post, it's is better to put one big post here instead of just giving website link like that.
With this kind of post will give a bad impression to the investor.

[NewWorldCoiner]

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Well played sir, you handled that well!

Didn't mean to sound harsh, but we see these sorts of announcements all the time. Generally, the poorer they are, the more they look like a scam. Plus, it's getting ridiculous with all these ICO's now, it's not good for the market.

Sounds interesting so far, I'll keep an eye on it.

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.

Hmm. Will the search engine be be accessible by everyone who uses the ethereum blockchain? Like a search bar in their wallet, regardless of what token it is? Is that possible?

I definitely share your views on Google. Way too powerful now, they are essentially steering the course of history by controlling the flow of information. I think a decentralised gatekeeper is long overdue.

[bournekin]

I really hope that the information regarding any bounty campaign will be available for this project.

[colinp]

Hmm. Will the search engine be be accessible by everyone who uses the ethereum blockchain? Like a search bar in their wallet, regardless of what token it is? Is that possible?

I definitely share your views on Google. Way too powerful now, they are essentially steering the course of history by controlling the flow of information. I think a decentralised gatekeeper is long overdue.

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...

[55Domains]

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.

You had me there, all good then.
Now im curious and will patiently wait to learn what domain will be used.

I wish you all the best with this Project, and you are right, imo, "no one" should have that much power, but they do and taking a portion of it will be very challenging, ill dev stick around and watch this go down, it will be a very very interesting thing to watch if you (and team) succeeds.

P.S. im a bit disappointed by the amount of Tokens available, why oh why did it need to be 1Billion. well, atleast its not 50... .

[boltz]

Ohh so many of us wants easy btc but this ico is funny )

[Gandalf86]

Hi Colin, I have a few questions for you here:

1. Why do you use an ETH token? If you're not using any specific ETH features you could in general also run your own coin with its own chain, which would be a much more lightweight solution. Personally I don't like ETH too much, that's why I'm asking.   It's way too big and bloated IMO. Have you considered alternative options to ETH? What about running your own ETH chain between the search engine nodes if ETH is what you need?

2. How are users going to spend DST? I read that people can pay developers for making new features using DST. Anything else? Are there any features (performance, search accuracy or other search features) that people can spend their DST for?

3. If the network is being decentralized, how are nodes going to be rewarded? Do people need to spend a small amount of DST to make their search, and pay the nodes which are processing it? Are nodes going to be rewarded for the indexing/crawling work that they probably need to do?

4. Have you evaluated the possibilities of working together, extending or integrating your ideas and especially the monetary/blockchain aspect with an existing distributed search engine such as YaCy? http://www.yacy.net/en/

Thanks for coming here, however I see this is going to be a pretty small ICO if things continue like this ... which leads to my 5th question:

5. How much do you depend on funds raised by ICO? Are you going to be able to continue and finish this project if you just raise a small amount?

6. What is the "token presale" vs. the "initial token sale" that is mentioned on your website?

[sarul]

Looks so serious, I love that web design colour full. What about the unsold coin during ICO, is there plan to burn it? If yes, this token will have a good chance to walk on this world.

[jeeb]

How much money are you going to raise during the ICO ?  Just to meet the funding for project development?  Or   just  as much money as possible?  How to deal with unsold tokens?  and  when  is the presale?

[worthyou]

It is quite interesting. I am looking for more information.

[Gandalf86]

Hi Colin, I have a few questions for you here:

1. Why do you use an ETH token? If you're not using any specific ETH features you could in general also run your own coin with its own chain, which would be a much more lightweight solution. Personally I don't like ETH too much, that's why I'm asking.   It's way too big and bloated IMO. Have you considered alternative options to ETH? What about running your own ETH chain between the search engine nodes if ETH is what you need?

2. How are users going to spend DST? I read that people can pay developers for making new features using DST. Anything else? Are there any features (performance, search accuracy or other search features) that people can spend their DST for?

3. If the network is being decentralized, how are nodes going to be rewarded? Do people need to spend a small amount of DST to make their search, and pay the nodes which are processing it? Are nodes going to be rewarded for the indexing/crawling work that they probably need to do?

4. Have you evaluated the possibilities of working together, extending or integrating your ideas and especially the monetary/blockchain aspect with an existing distributed search engine such as YaCy? http://www.yacy.net/en/

Thanks for coming here, however I see this is going to be a pretty small ICO if things continue like this ... which leads to my 5th question:

5. How much do you depend on funds raised by ICO? Are you going to be able to continue and finish this project if you just raise a small amount?

6. What is the "token presale" vs. the "initial token sale" that is mentioned on your website?

Phew, no answers? Must say that I'm a bit disappointed. 

[colinp]

Hi Colin, I have a few questions for you here:

1. Why do you use an ETH token? If you're not using any specific ETH features you could in general also run your own coin with its own chain, which would be a much more lightweight solution. Personally I don't like ETH too much, that's why I'm asking.   It's way too big and bloated IMO. Have you considered alternative options to ETH? What about running your own ETH chain between the search engine nodes if ETH is what you need?

2. How are users going to spend DST? I read that people can pay developers for making new features using DST. Anything else? Are there any features (performance, search accuracy or other search features) that people can spend their DST for?

3. If the network is being decentralized, how are nodes going to be rewarded? Do people need to spend a small amount of DST to make their search, and pay the nodes which are processing it? Are nodes going to be rewarded for the indexing/crawling work that they probably need to do?

4. Have you evaluated the possibilities of working together, extending or integrating your ideas and especially the monetary/blockchain aspect with an existing distributed search engine such as YaCy? http://www.yacy.net/en/

Thanks for coming here, however I see this is going to be a pretty small ICO if things continue like this ... which leads to my 5th question:

5. How much do you depend on funds raised by ICO? Are you going to be able to continue and finish this project if you just raise a small amount?

6. What is the "token presale" vs. the "initial token sale" that is mentioned on your website?

Phew, no answers? Must say that I'm a bit disappointed. 

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

[dealung]

I hope dev will offer nice bounties regrading this and so many people would like to be part this community.