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There are a lot of privacy-focused search engines that aim to respect the end users and not use them as a cash cow for big corporations. For a while, I used DuckDuckGo as my main search engine. However, ever since I began using PRESEARCH at the beginning of 2021, I've been quite satisfied with its performance. As a nice bonus, I earn a few PRE tokens each day from searching.
What interested me the most about Presearch, however, was its mission to make the search engine decentralized via nodes. If you check out its roadmap, it plans to launch the mainnet later this year with the network fully powered by user nodes.
I initially planned to earn PRE each day via searching until I hit over 1000 PRE. However, when I saw the price of the token falling, I decided to purchase 1000 PRE when it hit around $0.06 per token. I launched my own node, staked my recently purchased 1000 PRE, and ran it for a few days.
How much PRE did I earn? Well, if you plan to launch your own Presearch node expecting huge rewards, then prepare to be disappointed. From the past few days I've had my node running, I have earned about 1.15 PRE under 8 hours of uptime. Something to note is that whenever your node performs a search, you will receive a little bump on your PRE rewards.
Obviously, just a smidge over 1 PRE is not impressive. However, the good news is that running a node is not that resource intensive. For an impromptu experiment, I switched my Ryzen 2700X to "Ondemand" mode on Corectrl. As you can see, while clockspeeds did spike, the activity is not much different than when I just use my desktop for internet browsing. It's not like when I, for instance, run xmrig and the CPU constantly runs at max clockspeeds.
A sample of my CPU's activity when I run a Presearch node.
I typically keep both my CPU and GPU on low power modes (unless I play a game). Basically, you can run a node and do other stuff as you passively earn PRE. You can do work, game, watch videos, or anything else just as long as the node still runs on Docker.
While the returns are thus far underwhelming, I'm doing this mainly to help decentralize the internet. I think Presearch has a pretty noble goal and by running a node, I am actively contributing to that cause.
If you want to run your own Presearch node and you use Ubuntu/Linux Mint, I made a guide on how to launch one here. If you don't have a Presearch account and this interests you, then you can click on this referral link for a 25 PRE bonus. The price of PRE is also pretty low currently, so it won't cost that much to get the 1000 tokens to stake on your node.
