One thing I wonder about is, what will be the terms of the ICO? Is it a first-come, first serve with fixed price? (in which case people like me would need to start allocating funds much earlier). If so, what is the price? Or will the tokens simply be distributed proportionally to the amount of money someone invested? In that case, do you count the price at the day of investing (e.g. 1 BTC = $2500 on day 1) or on the final day, when the price may be different? (e.g. the same BTC may only be $2000 or even $3000 on 27th July). You should announce these things before the ICO starts, so people can accumulate funds early if necessary.
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.
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.
Ok I don't quite get these points ... the network is running decentralized between nodes, right? Why would I run a node? Do I have any advantage from it? It costs money (or resources in general) to run a reliable node.
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.
As a user, I would rather pay to NOT have advertisements, lol. There are enough search engines that don't have ads, and also there are ad blockers ... I would rather expect to be
paid for looking at advertisements, seriously.
I'm not quite sure how this business model will work? Also, who will the advertisers pay money to? To your company? Or the node operators and users of the network.
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:
https://www.presearch.io/forumimages/sponsorship.gif(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.
Thirdly, how do you want to make people switch their search engine? Are there any distinctive features that your product will offer, compared to, say, DuckDuckGo? I'm not quite sure what you mean by "search tool". Every search engine is a search tool for me.
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%20dnjournalAnd 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%20localThere 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.
Also I've been quite accustomed to the way I am searching, I'm not sure I would be interested in a way to "customize" the interface or so ... or even pay money for it?! Most people just want something that works. And if you're ultra-fancy you can even have Google "themes" or such stuff. The problem with customizing the interface itself that I see is that it also requires you to change your workflow. So it will be essentially the Emacs of search engines, that only a few nerds are using.
The most important
feature that today's search engines have, IMO, is that they are
simple, and they all work the same.
So to make this clear, I'm not trying to be negative, but I'm asking the questions that are critical to me, in order to understand if I like your concept or not.
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
