When the #SearchWithPresearch writing competition I was pretty pumped. I think I have read all the PublishOx articles that come out on Presearch, I use it every day and thought it was a pretty great product. However, as I poked around PRESEARCH and started reflecting more objectively on my experience, I detected some issues I couldn't ignore. Now, I have observed a tendency for these contests to be won by the most enthusiastic and rhapsodic trumpeters of the contest promoters, or those who go on deep dives of the arcana to be explored. I'm not here to doubt these contests...passion and enthusiasm make for better reading, and probably spur on deeper research, so there are legit reasons why big fans win these things. I guess I could have talked about how PRE is the best thing ever because some people are making bank operating nodes or because they chose a blue square that kind of reminds me of the Periodic Table of the Elements as their logo. But I actually can't. I have to believe that PubOx and the contest subjects want honesty.
I want to be a fan, too, but I will always tell you what I think. The truth and nothing but the truth. And, unless you got a sweetheart deal and are pumping PRE nodes and staking search terms, the truth is that I literally cannot imagine a normal search engine user, or even casual cryptocurrency enthusiast thinking that Presearch is anything better than a long-term, more or less functional, faucet play.
That being said, I LOVE FAUCETS! I don't get too upset about mindlessly clicking like a pigeon that got its head slammed in the cage door one too many times for scraps of coin that someday I will be able to redeem for real-boy coin. The fact that this faucet can handle 70% or so of my internet searches is a plus. I can click this faucet while I really actually use it. Not too shabby. But...the next great thing?
To my mind, Presearch is like almost everything else I've run across in Cryptoworld. If you get here first and get staked early, you will slay. The best crypto sorcerers are way ahead of contests and hype like this. They are "there" before we even know there is a "there." The smart money already is in PRE, I imagine. They won't hesitate to buy 20,000 PRE and lock up nodes and stake search terms. I think they will do very well, especially if little peons like me click around like braindamaged pigeons lighting up the fibers of their nodes and jumping on their search terms. If you are That Money, more power to you. I don't begrudge you a single node. It just isn't me. Not quite yet. So my viewpoint on Presearch is...Is it worth using?
A Middle Earth of Use Cases
There is a white paper and an entire planned ecosystem for Presearch, and as a token, PRE is linked to actual products that function in the world. Investment experts can give a better opinion on whether it holds up.
For me, though, the real use case for Presearch is in the weird Middle Earth that exists between two competing desires. On the one end of Middle Earth is the desire to escape the blazing all-seeing eye of Mordor (do I even need to say it? OK, it's Google...crap, now I'm indexed!). Here, we just want to frolic in grassy fields of the Shire, enjoying farming or kicking things or whatever it was that Hobbits did for fun. On the other end of Middle Earth is the desire to get just a little of the swag that all those badass Ring wielders have. Why can't I get a little precious? Shouldn't I be able to monetize every second of my day? (The answer is yes, a-duh...but at what cost, Gollum?).
Many people would like to get Google and their legions of Evil Bastards out of their lives and out of their business. The attention economy is pretty destructive. The Armies of Mordor watch everything we do, and corrupt us with their little nudges to do more and more of it. When I want to salivate over luscious pictures of 1950s and 60s European micro-cars, I don't want ads for local auto sales popping up on my phone, email, search results, in-game ads, etc. So, Presearch tells us we can search privately. In other words, it is putting on its best DuckDuckGo outfit.
But, we also want to earn something for all our interactions with the internet and the commercial world. Gollum wants the Precious! We know the social safety net and the fiat money systems are letting us down, so we need to hustle 24-7. Why shouldn't I get paid for searching the internet? I get tokens and credits and miles and points for buying coffee, flying (back in the olden times when that was a thing), paying my bills, and playing games, so show me the money for my search! Presearch to the rescue! Presearch will pay us PRE(cious?) coin for every search. In other words -- and don't laugh! -- it is putting on its best Bing Search Rewards costume.
Would the world be better off with search engines that honor privacy? Yes! But DuckDuckGo already exists and gives better results in my experience (and doesn't call me a Spam for no fricking reason!) Presearch is particularly weak on image searching, but is reasonable in most areas. And pretty good on crypto. But a few examples just make me wonder. In a Presearch for "google" google.com was the 3rd option returned. Maybe that's too obscure. How about Presearch itself, then? When I searched "PRE price coingecko" it came up with everything under the sun except for the PRE coin. It was only when I added "PRE Presearch coin coingecko" that it got it right. Also, "how did Presearch develop its reliability score" returned a hodgepodge of academic papers and only one entry about Presearch on the first page. When I switched that to "how did Presearch develop the Reward Verification System" the first three results were from Presearch's medium page. Now I know you might be thinking I should just have searched for the right term the first time. But isn't that the point of a search? I couldn't remember the name of their You Are A Spam feature, so I searched for it. I had to look it up somewhere else in order to get Presearch to give me the information I wanted...about Presearch.
Would I be better off if search engines paid me for the data I provide with my searches? Yes! But -- and don't laugh! -- monstrosities like Bing Search Rewards are much, much more profitable. And give better search results in my experience. (Think about that... Bing actually out performs another search engine. Doesn't that, like, take away Bing's reason to exist?)
Would I be a better person supporting worthy projects through my internet searches? Yes! But there already is Ecosia to capture my charitable searches. That gives a much more direct benefit than using a blockchain project, right?
OK, but maybe we need a blockchain, crypto version of everything? Well, I suppose so. The decentralized nature of Presearch's strategy is very cool, although maybe not foolproof against authoritarians bent on owning their national internet. However, if it means getting worse search performance, I had better be earning legit crypto.
Am I earning good crypto with Presearch? It almost doesn't matter because of a few really important "features."
Feature 1. No withdrawals of your PRE search pay until you get 1000. 1000! Uhmmm.
Feature 2. Robot say U R A Spam. I don't really love it when the digital hellspawn that is CAPTCHA tells me I might be a robot, and I also don't really love it when some mysterious algorithm tells me I am doing fake searches. The "Rewards Verification System" recently upgraded me from a 5/10 to a 6/10. Yippee. I have absolutely never done a spam search spree. Not at all, not even a little bit. It is an outrage that no less than 40-50% of my searches are judged invalid!! Outrage! If you don't think this is a big deal, then more power to you, but they claim to award participation in their creaky little search engine with PRE. But they really don't. They halved the amount of PRE they give now for searches compared to even a couple of months ago, AND through some all-powerful top secret trust-us-we're-the-good-guys algorithm, they will keep even more of that shrunken share of PRE to themselves. Why? Just Cuz. We think you are a Spam. Super awesome dudes!
Anyway, you will hear a lot about how the actual rewards are really higher because PRE is worth more or that the Verification system prevents abuse in the system, but I am sorry. That sounds like someone who feels they are on the right side of things and doesn't care that they system is pretty rigged in favor of the institutionalists. First, it's not like another faucet with a budget that pays out in someone else's coin, like BTC. Presearch already has the PRE. They don't need to buy more, so the price of PRE does not automatically need to reduce rewards for economic reasons. Second, don't lie to me. Hey, if you want to tell me you are really going to give me 60% or less of .12 PRE tokens per search, then tell me that. Don't tell me I signed up at 100% of .25 PRE per search and then call me a Spam, assure me it's for my own good, then point to the token price trajectory to justify stiffing me.
OK, let me pause. This is weird. I have been using Presearch exactly every day since February, and I thought I was happy. But this contest and this article are.... well, they're starting to change my mind a bit. I should never have looked under the hood and found out I was 40% a Spam!!
Anyway, I am a curious guy, and toying around with mysteries and puzzles makes me happy. Therefore, to boost my mood and yours, I want to close with two other puzzles presented by Presearch: One about their promiscuous search engine hookups, and the other about thinking of PRE as a pure crypto play.
1. What is with all of the search engines you can use instead of Presearch? There is a whole busload of them. A busload of buses. Their basic, suggested set includes DuckDuckGo, YouTube, EtherScan, Google (GOOOGGGGGLLLLLEEEE!!!! Whaaaaaaaah?), something called Dsearch, CoinGecko, CoinMarketCap, and Twitter. But don't stop there, because you can peruse a list of 121 other search providers (I counted). You can even add more if you want! Why not?! I do not understand why I would click through Presearch just to end up with Overstock.com's results, but perhaps there is a pent up need there I am oblivious to. I tried a test run to see if an Etsy search generated PRE tokens. It appears that it did not. "My search term went to Presearch and all I got was this Etsy t-shirt."
I would try more tests like this, but Presearch already thinks I am a Spam.
2. I have read elsewhere that Presearch makes a great intro to the world of cryptocurrencies for beginners. Speaking as a beginner, I want to say "Sure!" But should I? Of course there are the pesky notions that if Presearch thinks you are a Spam, or if it continues to half the payout per search, you might need years, years!, of carefully searching to be able to trade your PRE coins. What about straight up buying and selling? I am not any kind of expert, or even a sort of competent idiot in this area, but I do wonder. Trading volume has been all over the place in March 2021. According to CoinGecko (which I found on my second try with Presearch) just in the first 17 days of this month of March, trading volume has ranged between $19,519 (yes, that's nineteen thousand dollars, not million) to $1,201,462. I would feel more confident in steady, nice-sized volume so that I could have consistent hopes of getting into or out of this asset. What if you hit on a day when under 20 grand was traded in the entire world? I have read that there are about 400 MILLION PRE circulating. What kind of circulation is this? On the big day, at roughly $0.10 per PRE, 12 million worth changed hands. And on the little day, well, that could have been a keystroke error, who knows? I'm not sure that makes the best introduction to crypto for the cryptocurious. Brave's BAT makes a much better introduction in my mind. But both BAT and PRE face that big problem that makes either of them a hard sell for a dabbler - a typical user is going to take a loooooooooooooooong time before they get to ride the dragon of $19,519.43 worth of wild PRE trading!
So where does that leave us? Well, for one, Presearch has a profile that seems way out of scale to its market cap and its functionality. I think you could choose to see that as a Baby Mike Tyson just about to start beating rival heads in. I think you also could choose to see that as a Big Talker getting lots of press on empty promises. I can't tell either way to be honest. Right now my PRE count is at 134.35. Of course, because Presearch thinks I am a Spam, it is only letting me have 80 of those. 80. I have been using Presearch as my main search engine for 6-8 weeks. You can conclude 2 things from this.
1.) I am a shitty Spam. Seriously. If I was a Spam, I'd be just starting to give up on AOL and Geocities and looking at hitting up Napster and MySpace.
2.) With Presearch letting me have about 50 of the PRE they promised me per month, I am 200 months away from being actually able to trade or sell my coins.
Presearch gets me about 70% of my search engine needs and sort of rewards my activity with a token that is barely traded and that I will be able to make money from late in the year 2036. And for that killing I am making, it calls me a Spam.
That, my friends, is the creme de la creme of a long-term faucet play.
On the other hand, if I can convince 400 people to sign up with my referral link, I can start rocking today!! Let's do this! You will get 25 PRE and I might get 25 PRE too! Or some part of it! I don't know! I am only a Spam!
This has been entry to PublishOx's #SearchWithPresearch writing competition. I probably won't be ranked as the #1 Presearch cheerleader. But, I do hope that you appreciate me being true to my perspective, whether you agree with it or not. If you do want to roll with Presearch, it would be great if you used my referral, then built your own army of 400 referrals! For you or me to get 25 free PRE though, people need to be active for 30 days and earn 50 PRE worth in searches. Yeah, so I have 14 referrals as I write this and 1 has qualified. Have realistic expectations, OK?
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If you don't want to wait until 2036 to get some money out of a faucet, here are two I use and can recommend
Cointiply -- http://cointiply.com/r/p9Gyy (with my guide on how I earn here)
BetFury -- https://betfury.io/?r=601502337521da79ce95370b (with my guide on how I earn here)
