Search and ye shall … almost certainly be tracked.
However a rising variety of individuals need to search with out leaving a path, which is why privacy-focused search engines like google and yahoo like DuckDuckGo and Courageous Search are gaining extra traction.
DuckDuckGo, for instance, is now the fifth hottest search engine worldwide as of July, in accordance with Statcounter. (Not too shabby, though it’s price noting that DuckDuckGo’s market share is vanishingly small – lower than 1% – in comparison with Google, which has almost 90% of the worldwide search market.)
Google’s search dominance is a perform of its tight integration with Chrome. DuckDuckGo and Courageous Search additionally join their non-public search engines like google and yahoo to browsers, albeit ones designed particularly to dam trackers and decrease knowledge assortment.
However Presearch is taking a special method.
It describes itself as an “moral, non-profiling meta-search engine,” which is a mouthful, however mainly implies that it by no means tracks customers and, quite than being tied to a conventional browser, operates on a decentralized community powered by its neighborhood of customers that rewards them with its personal cryptocurrency tokens – known as PRE – in change for working searches.
That doesn’t sound just like the type of firm that might even have an promoting enterprise, however it most definitely does.
So I sat down with Presearch CEO Tim Enneking to know how on earth it really works.
AdExchanger: How would you describe Presearch in a nutshell, however with out utilizing the phrase “moral, non-profiling meta-search engine”?
TIM ENNEKING: It’s not that jargony when you take the items aside! “Meta” refers to the truth that Presearch connects to simply over 130 search engines like google and yahoo. While you do a search with us, we pull from a number of different search engines like google and yahoo and combination the ends in one place.
We even have a decentralized or distributed structure with round 40,000 nodes worldwide. Searches are routed by means of totally different nodes, making it unimaginable to profile customers or observe search habits.
And we contemplate ourselves moral, as a result of now we have no knowledge on any of our customers. Even when somebody units up a Presearch account and now we have their e-mail deal with, it’s not tied to a URL or an ISP or an IP deal with.
So, are you want a VPN for search or, how do I put this, a condom for Chrome?
Primarily, sure.
Who’re your customers?
Now we have quite a lot of “crypto natives,” however we even have lots of people we contemplate “tech ahead” individuals. You don’t must care about or find out about crypto to make use of our search engine.
Not too long ago, we’ve began pivoting extra towards non-crypto individuals, as a result of that’s a a lot greater viewers. We’re making an attempt to attraction to extra demographics usually. So, sure, we skew male and single, however we even have quite a lot of ladies customers.
Proper now, we’ve bought about 115,000 month-to-month energetic customers, we see roughly half one million searches a day and we generate greater than 13 million impressions.
Why did you resolve to launch an adverts enterprise?
The prior administration bought a bunch of cash through the ICO craze in 2017 and 2018 and so for the primary six years of this venture, till I bought concerned, there was no monetization in any respect. However when the cash ran out it was like, “Properly, boys, it’s time.”
However we warred with our resolution. Our customers don’t essentially need promoting, however I do suppose individuals perceive that it’s inevitable in lots of circumstances.
How do you steadiness the necessity to generate income, together with by means of adverts, along with your dedication to person privateness and decentralization?
By being respectful. Our motto is: Advertisements as artwork.
For instance, now we have takeover adverts which can be like background wallpaper for the homepage. They’re massive and so they’re impactful, so advertisers like them, however we’ve gotten just about no complaints from customers, as a result of these adverts don’t change the expertise.
We even have key phrase adverts, which is the place advertisers hire key phrases by staking PRE tokens and pay a 1% month-to-month price to maneuver their outcome into the third place. Now we have no adverts on the prime of our outcomes.
What does that seem like in apply?
For instance, say you stake 1,000 PRE tokens on actual matches for the phrase “drone” and then you definitely pay 10 tokens month-to-month to rank increased. However when you’re outbid, you get notified and you may elevate your stake, which typically sparks a bidding struggle.
We choose longer, extra particular key phrases to maintain the accuracy as excessive as doable – so “anti-drone system” versus simply “drone” – however it’s all the time about outcomes first, which means customers see at the least two fully unfiltered and unbiased search outcomes earlier than they see any keyword-staked adverts.
That’s fascinating, however I don’t suppose it’s for everybody. What kind of advertisers do you’re employed with?
We had an company with Macy’s as a consumer and so they wished to do one thing with us, however we truly went again and mentioned, “Look, guys, Macy’s is a stunning retailer, however we don’t suppose that is going to be a profitable marketing campaign, as a result of we simply don’t have the precise demo for you.”
We get quite a lot of corporations with new tech merchandise, new token launches, occasions are an enormous one, and we’ve additionally seen quite a lot of curiosity from newsletters, truly. TLDR, for instance, actually likes us. They do these day by day very transient summary-style newsletters about startups and tech and programming, which is smart for our viewers.
Are you nervous or excited in regards to the rise of AI search?
It’s an existential menace, and to deal with that we’re constructing an MCP layer – mannequin context protocol – that can feed into agentic AI.
It’ll be a proprietary search engine utilizing a decentralized crawler, index and AI nodes. We’ve already bought this working in beta. Additionally, in contrast to different search engines like google and yahoo that simply bolt AI on prime, we’re constructing ours so AI fashions are built-in proper into the search infrastructure.
Do you see a future the place privacy-centric platforms like Presearch ever turn out to be mainstream, or will you guys stay a distinct segment various?
We’ll keep area of interest for some time, and I do suppose there are particular limits to how a lot we are able to develop as a result of, let’s face it, most individuals search on Google. However after all we see alternative. I imply, it’s one of many the explanation why we’re launching our personal proprietary search engine.
Solutions have been evenly edited and condensed.
🙏 Thanks for studying! Do you know there’s truly a technique to hold observe of cat-themed crypto cash? (!) As all the time, be happy to drop me a line at allison@adexchanger.com with any feedback or suggestions.
