Decentralized Search Engine Hoping to Rival Google Launches on Mainnet

Decentralized Search Engine Hoping to Rival Google Launches on Mainnet
A woman types on a keyboard in New York. (Jenny Kane/AP Photo)
Benzinga
5/27/2022
Updated:
5/27/2022
A privacy-focused decentralized search engine has been launched on the public mainnet.

What Happened

Presearch, a community-driven blockchain, hopes to rival Alphabet Inc’s Google with its newly launched search engine.

“In a world where one company controls 92 percent of the search engine market and the flow of information for billions of people, there’s a clear need for a decentralized, Web3 alternative,” said Presearch founder Colin Pape, in a press release shared with Benzinga.

The platform has 3.8 million registered users and 150 million monthly searches. The search engine runs on 65,000 nodes distributed across the computers of its community members.

Essentially, these nodes are the providers of the decentralized computing resources required to power the network. They privately anonymize queries and return results for incoming searches.

The node operators will be rewarded with the blockchain’s native cryptocurrency token PRE for each successfully processed query, similar to how Bitcoin miners earn block rewards when processing financial transactions.

Today’s shift from testnet to mainnet is particularly significant because the blockchain will be capable of processing over 5 million daily private searches, with the ability to scale to hundreds of millions.

“With Google and other search engines, search algorithms are hidden and controlled by a few powerful people. Decentralization flips the script, allowing for the information we have access to be open and community-driven,” Pape told Benzinga.

“Our mainnet launch establishes a way for blockchain protocols to continue serving a larger purpose for users worldwide.”

By Samyuktha Sriram
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