Will The Blockchain Start-up With 1M Users Break Your Google Habit- Part 3

The Continuation From The Previous Post

To be taken on trust, for now, is Presearch’s claim of not to be storing or otherwise tracking users’ searches as it intends to fully open-source the platform ensuring truly accountable transparency shortly. Furthermore, he notes that the founders were in the meantime making themselves available to the users via a messaging group on Telegram contrasting the accessibility with perfect unreachability of Google’s founders to the average Google user. With their ecosystem’s community-building imperatives, in the modern age of messaging apps, these founders are most certainly not operating in a vacuum. It is here that currently, one PRE token can buy an advertiser four ad impressions on the platform as it is one lever Presearch can pull on to influence the value of the token as the ecosystem develops. 

As Pape suggests there are ultimately impressions per token set to go to ten, a hundred as obviously going to change the token and they’ll do that as they see the market forces thereby working as how many of them are willing to sell their tokens. Beginning life as an internal search tool built for use at the founders’ other company Presearch reduces time tracking down information online as they see the crypto boom catching their eye as they saw possible incentive structure encouraging Google users to switch. 

Being the obvious route for Presearch to grow a blockchain-based, community sustaining closed-loop ecosystem is a token sale followed to raise funds for developing the platform. Here Pape notes that there is one of the keys the ownership structure making sure that all participants within the ecosystem are aligned under what is one unit of account that is the token. It has thereby conflicting interests as there’s an equity incentive as well that may run counter to that token. 

Raising an initial $7 M token sale whereas the lucky timing was meant that Presearch was found riding the cryptocurrency rollercoaster during an upward wave meaning funds appreciated around $ 21 M by the end of the sale period. Launched as the first version of the platform the token was launched at the end of November 2017. Here according to Pape, several hundred advertisers are participating in testing phases of the platform with a new version pending for launch shortly with a different ad unit arriving with a dozen curated sponsors on board. He adds that there is more brand exposure as they want to be selective in the early days making sure that they are only partnering with aligned projects. 

The Highlights Of Presearch

Available for Chrome, Brave, and Firefox browsers the new extension works to shave off usability friction where previously beta users had to set Presearch as the homepage remembering to type its address into the URL bar before searching. He adds that there’s a really good alignment thereafter of the core community while ultimately it does come down to changing user habit as well as behavior and that is always challenging where the new browser extension enables them to use the browser URL field or the search field accessing Presearch through the UI used to and that they’ve been demanding. 

According to Pape, almost a quarter of the signups stick around and it becomes active users as who dubs that already really high where the team is expecting the new browser extensions to fuel significant further growth. He further states that they are getting ready to push it further out to the users through email as they were going to see a significant increase in the percentage of users utilizing it as if the assumption holds through as everything holds out as they are going to do a much more active push to grow the user base. 

Tapping into the voice search trend they also launched an iOS Presearch app where the users can speak to search services along with a library of sites that can be added to the app to enable deep searching of web resources as well as apps running locally on the device. Attached to the convenience of voice search the competition concerns are attached risking further flattening consumer choice and concentrating already highly concentrated market power given its focus on filtering options to return just one search result which is an area of interest for antitrust regulators. 

The Continuation To The Last Part Of The Discussion

In an interview, Europe’s antitrust chief Vestager had said that she was trying to figure out how it is to have competition when they have voice search and perhaps Presearch’s federated blockchain platform approach offering a glimpse of a possible solution. We look into this in the next post.