The end of Google? Search-engine on the Blockchain, meet Presearch

steewrit (45)in #technology • 7 years ago

What is Presearch?

Presearch aims to be an open, decentralized search engine which incentivizes community members with DST (Decentralized Search Tokens) for the usage, contribution and promotion of the platform. Human curation is central for the overall development of the platform, as the project believes that community-driven decision-making ensures that everyone’s interests will be aligned, and therefore the best content is surfaced and displayed. In the beta release, Presearch will be more of a search tool than a search engine, the user will be able to choose which engine they search with from the Presearch interface. Google will be the default option, minimizing switching costs for the majority of users. Users will also be exposed to alternative engines, including DuckDuckGo, social search engines, domain WHOIS engines and more.

Why Presearch?

The internet was created as a distributed and decentralized platform, but due to massive mediums such as Google, Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Amazon, most of our online activities are monopolized by only a few companies. While most of these services originated as ‘closed’ systems in which people consciously choose to participate -having no real expectation of neutrality or impartiality - Google stands out for being perceived as a bringer of objective internet truth.

Originating as a Stanford project that sought to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible, it has since grown to obtain 77% of global desktop searches and 96% of mobile searches – more than 5 billion queries per day – and generating almost $100 billion in annual revenue (Presearch Whitepaper). Google, also due to their origin as an academic project, has been perceived as a neutral resource for guiding you to the appropriate answers that are chosen automatically by algorithm. Presearch states that Google shifted from the early days and since built up “a track record of promoting their own properties at the expense of alternatives, appropriating others’ info and operating in secrecy”. They see Google as “manually manipulating the results while hiding behind their algorithm, justifying all changes as being best for the user”(Presearch Whitepaper).

The history between Presearch and Google

As seen below in the Team section, both the Project Lead as Technical Lead of Presearch come from ShopCity, a company with a history with google. In 2011 ShopCity, the parent company of local sites such as ShopPaloAlto.com, ShopMountainView.com and ShopPleasanton.com, publicly challenged the fairness of the search giant Google. ShopCity’s suspicions were triggered when, two days after the June 24 announcement of the FTC inquiry, ShopPaloAlto.com and other Bay Area sites suddenly began ranking better on Google, providing a temporary 400 percent increase in search-engine driven traffic, only to fall back to near zero in mid-July when Google downgraded its sites again. Colin Pape, the president of ShopCity, said ShopCity was unable to get a reply from Google about what happened.

Google provided it an unfairly low ranking according to ShopCity, especially since those sites had the backing of groups such as the city of Menlo Park, the Palo Alto Chamber of Commerce and the Palo Alto Weekly newspaper. A search for “Palo Alto restaurants” on Google didn’t reveal a ShopPaloAlto.com result until the seventh page of results, while the site ranks at the top for identical searches on Yahoo or Microsoft’s Bing.

Google defended its rankings as serving users, but ShopCity said Google was taking its content and displaying it in Google Places, which like ShopCity displays business information such as location, operating hours and customer reviews. The practice is called “scraping,” and companies like Yelp and TripAdvisor.com also have complained about the practice.
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. (Source of the story: http://www.mercurynews.com/2011/07/28/local-business-site-challenges-google-ranking/)

It seems their history with google sparked the motivation for bringing a decentralized search engine to the world.