IF GOOGLE WERE TEAL

HOW MANY INTERNET SEARCHES DO YOU DO IN A TYPICAL DAY? During a busy session of teaching English online, I can rack up 100 queries, related to topics which my students have raised. One week I clocked in a whopping 360 searches, with terms ranging from "kiszona kapusta" to "Doctor Who time loops". They were all conducted on a single search engine (can you guess which one?)

We give an awful lot of personal data away just for the privilege of using their platforms. Don't get me wrong, I love Google -- they are generous to their content creators. For basic consumers, the benefits are rather scant, however. Bing will reward you with points for choosing their machine, but they must be redeemed by shopping at the Microsoft Store. If you want to be paid in cold hard cash (cryptocash at least!), Presearch is the only program out there. You can earn 0.1PRE per search, with a cap of 25 searches per day.

As of December 2022, that was worth US$0.81.

Sign in page for Presearch

That might seem like chump change for some, but it all adds up, and it is better than earning nothing at all. More importantly, your PRE gives you voting and ownership rights and the ability to build a search engine that is for the people, by the people. A Teal organization, to be precise. Sounds pretty exciting, right?

PLAYING IT FORWARD

YOU CAN cash out once you hit a certain threshold, but for me it would be more satisfying to keep my tokens within the ecosystem, and leverage my opportunities here. This brings me to the second key innovation of Presearch: the ability to buy ads to advertise your own websites. In fact, Presearch employs a unique staking approach as opposed to the pay-per-click system used by Google Ads. For 100PRE you can stake a keyword and your ad will appear at the top of the search results. If that keyword is already taken, you can outbid the holder by raising the stakes.

Interestingly, both "kiszona kaputsa" and "doctor who time loops" were free the last time I checked! I could potentially stake them forever, so long as nobody outbids me someday. If the ads are directed to archived URLs on the Arweave blockchain, I could be getting traffic long beyond the grave.

That would be one hell of a long tail!

After you have created your ad, Presearch's dashboard will keep track of position, views and clicks, but that is about all. For more analytical information, such as how many impressions you can expect for particular keywords, I am afraid I will have to work it out for myself, the freestyling way!

As of September 2022, PreSearch had 1.2 million users, serving 6.6 million searches. Google, on the other hand, processes over 8.5 billion searches per day. I might assume that Google attracts 1800 times more traffic than PreSearch.

From the white paper: "Presearch envisions a system whereby subject matter experts could curate collections of content that their domain knowledge indicates are most relevant to the query. This could be in the form of a featured snippet, onebox or query refinement result, or a specific subset of the index to further accentuate the relevance inferred by the algorithm. ..."

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