PRESEARCH - Community driven decentralized search

[mnixxo.crypto]

Presearch Nodes Are Coming

In our July update, we provided a first public teaser of what is one of the most exciting developments for the Presearch platform this year: the release of our decentralized Presearch Nodes. We promised we’d share more details on the Presearch Nodes in the lead up to the release of our new white paper on July 31st, so without further ado: we’d like to introduce the world to Presearch Nodes!

The Presearch platform has always been planned in phases, with the first phase focused on providing a useful search interface, growing the Presearch community and user base, and ultimately implementing our unique keyword-staking-based advertising model. The end goal has always been to build out a decentralized search engine, and under the leadership of our new CTO, we are now excited to be well on the way toward this next phase of the platform.

Search engines are complicated, and building a decentralized search engine provides some very unique challenges that don’t apply to centralized search engines. For example: How do you prevent malicious actors from running nodes and either stealing user information or returning dangerous or unwanted content? How do you get fast (hundreds of milliseconds) response times across a massively distributed network of servers with drastic variability in their performance and reliability? How do you properly incentivize people to run nodes and fairly balance supply and demand for nodes and searches within the network? Some of these we’ve already solved, and some will require continued experimentation and innovation over time, but we’ll be rolling out both the platform and the decentralization of the platform incrementally to ensure an optimal ongoing search experience for our amazing Presearch community.

Search Architecture

For our initial phase two platform release, there are six core layers of the Presearch search engine architecture:

Core Services: Advertising service, Account management, Search Rewards Tracking, Keyword Staking, Marketplace, and other critical Presearch services which are centrally managed by Presearch.

Web Server: Receives Search Requests from Presearch users and passes them on to the Gateway to get results. Returns a final rendered results page to the user.

Node Registry: Manages the identity of all Nodes, their stats, and any rewards payouts to the Node operators

Node Gateway: Receives requests from the Web Server, removes personally identifiable information from the search, requests and passes the search to one or more healthy Nodes

Nodes: Decentralized search “workers” which connect to the node gateway and perform search operations.

Search Packages: Open source plugins which bring back intelligent answers and info boxes for specific queries.

Our first phase of decentralization will be the release of the Nodes software, which anyone can run and for which we’ll need to build out an expansive and highly decentralized network.

The Gateway is intended to be decentralized in a future phase after the core search network has proven to be robust and secure. Gateway operators will eventually be a smaller network of trusted providers that the Presearch community can choose from (they would have access to and need to protect some private user information). For now, Presearch will operate as a single, trusted Gateway provider while the network is being built out. More and more of the platform will be decentralized over time as the project continues to evolve. The availability of the Nodes in this first software release will already enable the vast majority of the work performed during each search to be decentralized.

Node Operations

Node operators will ultimately be compensated in PRE for the work they provide to the network based upon the amount of value they add to the network. There are at least seven different kinds of operations that a Search Node can perform (with more likely in the future):

1. Registering (all nodes). Registering with a Node Gateway, which can then route queries to the node if it passes health and security validation.

2. Validating (all nodes). The Node will coordinate with a Node Validator to ensure that each node is only running trusted Presearch software (to avoid security issues from potential bad actors).

3. Aggregating. Processing and distributing queries sent by Node Gateways. This may require routing to multiple “Serving” Nodes and aggregating the results.

4. Federating. Proxying other data sources and returning their data as part of search results.

5. Serving. Hosting portions of the search index used to process queries.

6. Crawling. Crawling websites to build out search indexes.

7. Indexing. Writes federated or crawled data to search indexes to be served by serving Nodes.


Different kinds of servers will work better for running different Nodes for these different use cases. For example:

- Aggregating will work best on nodes with: low network latency, high network bandwidth, high memory (disk space unimportant, CPU useful, but can vary).

- Federating will work best on nodes with: low networking latency (cpu, memory, and disk space unimportant. High bandwidth preferred).

- Serving will work best on nodes with: high memory, high uptime, and low network latency (CPU and disk space useful, but can vary).

- Crawling will work best on nodes with: high disk space, high network bandwidth (CPU, memory, network latency, and uptime unimportant).

- Indexing will work best on nodes with: high disk space, high network bandwidth, low network latency, and reasonable CPU, memory, and uptime.

What’s in this First Release?

For the very first release of the Nodes, we will be focused on the following operations:
- Registering
- Validating
- Federating

This means that we will initially be aiming for a network of as many nodes as possible, provided as cheaply as possible, so long as their network latency is low. When we later add in Serving and Aggregating (enabling the Presearch search index to be decentralized), this will introduce the need for different and more powerful servers to join the network. When our Crawling becomes fully decentralized and supported by Nodes, the capacity of the network to crawl the web and refresh data will then be tied directly to the size of the network and its growth.

When will Nodes be Ready?

We are excited to announce that we are only months away from the public release of the Presearch Nodes software! We have a number of other announcements coming between now and then, including an updated explanation of the evolving Tokenomics of the project and how rewards for running Nodes, performing searches, and other activity will evolve over time.

In the meantime, we are excited to announce a Beta Testing program for our Presearch Nodes. We are not ready to begin beta testing just yet, but we are now opening sign-ups for those interested in helping us test and improve our Nodes software on a testnet prior to the mainnet launch. If you are interested in being a beta tester, you can request to be included using the following signup link:

Beta Test Signup Form (Waitlist)

Want to Learn More?

The new Presearch Whitepaper is coming out on July 31st (just 8 days away!) and will contain more detail on the Presearch Roadmap, Nodes, and other exciting updates. We are also working in parallel, on significant enhancements to the Presearch user experience and rewards model which will enable Presearch to smoothly transition into this next phase of the project with enhanced capabilities enabled through the enhanced search experience made possible by the upcoming release of the Presearch Nodes.

For the over 1.5 million registered Presearch users and thousands of Advertisers currently staking nearly 65 Million PRE tokens on the Presearch Keyword Staking platform, there has never been a more exciting time to be a part of the Presearch community!

[mnixxo.crypto]

It’s almost time!

The team is incredibly excited to show you what’s coming up next, and will publish the new white paper tomorrow, at 12:00 PM EST.

Stay tuned & Have a great day!

[mnixxo.crypto]

The Presearch team is excited to announce that the second version of our white paper is ready for download!



After months and weeks of meetings, debates, tests, trials and tribulations, it’s finally here!

The new Presearch white paper shall now be known as our Vision Paper (VP). We figured that with 2020 off to such a crazy start, we need better 2020 vision as we look to the future.

The VP weighs in at a hefty 65 pages. There’s a lot to this project — with all of our progress to date, and with what’s to come in the future — we didn’t want to skimp on the details just to save a few bits in the cloud.

We hope you find the Vision Paper informative and as exciting as we do! Presearch has a massive opportunity right before us, and this document is a great introduction to the project and a roadmap for how we’re going to realize our potential.

Although it was a lot of work to produce, the process was a real pleasure and great team-building exercise. I must say, we work very well together and there’s a ton of talent in this small group.

A big thank you to everyone who contributed to the document, specifically Amber, Trey, Tim, Ed, Marco, Dave, Corey & Thomas. But also, a huge thank
you to all of our supporters, friends, critics and HODLers for their input, inspiration and sometimes patience that’s enabled us to get to this point.

2020 is off to a crazy start, but we can still have a good finish with the right vision.

Without further adieu, please find the New 2020 Presearch Vision Paper: https://www.presearch.io/vision.pdf

[BitcoinBookmarks]

Interesting project, but I still can not understand why it's "decentralized". Looks like pretty centralized search engine. You mean that rewards system is decentralized?

[mnixxo.crypto]

Interesting project, but I still can not understand why it's "decentralized". Looks like pretty centralized search engine. You mean that rewards system is decentralized?

Presearch is now preparing to release its first decentralized technology – a new search engine experience that runs on node servers operated by Presearch community members.

And you cand find more information in the new whitepaper, p. 31:  Decentralized Search Engine

[mnixxo.crypto]

We're happy to announce that our CTO, Trey Grainger, will be available for a community AMA in http://T.me/Presearch on Friday, August 7th, at 12:00PM ET.

Trey will be here to answer all your technical questions, or any other questions you might have about the Vision Paper!

[mnixxo.crypto]

Missed last week's AMA with our CTO Trey? No problem! We just published a summary Fire

We're looking forward to hosting another community AMA soon!

https://medium.com/@presearch/presearch-community-ama-summary-61f568fd3f59

[mnixxo.crypto]

New Ad Flagging System Released

The Presearch Team is excited to announce that we’ve deployed the new ad flagging system, as outlined in our revised roadmap and Vision Paper.



This new system enables people searching on Presearch.org to flag low-quality or inappropriate ads placed using our innovative keyword staking platform. This enables community-driven feedback that improves ad quality and provides transparency into the process of improving ads for both advertisers and Presearch users themselves.

Since launching keyword staking in January of 2020, more than 65 million PRE have been staked against thousands of keywords.

While there have been limited incidences of abuse within the system, there is a growing opportunity for those wanting to reach the 1.5 million registered Presearch users to place deceptive ads or otherwise degrade the search experience with low-quality ads.

Fortunately, the staking model already provides a deterrent to people behaving maliciously, as they could lose their staked tokens if they are found to be causing harm to the community.

But to address more common occurrences of advertisers who are unaware of the guidelines, or who have different ideas about what constitutes a quality ad, we’ve created this new ad flagging system that community members can use to alert the project about potential issues with ads.



To use the system, just click the green flag icon within the ad and then fill out the corresponding form to let us know what potential issues you have may have found.



Project administrators then have the option to either pause the ad and request changes, delete the ad (if there is a serious violation of the ad policies), or let it stand as-is.

The person who submits the report will be notified via email about the actions taken, as will the advertiser, providing end-to-end transparency into the review process.

Eventually, we plan to further decentralize this process and enable ad reporters to stake PRE to submit a report, earning a bounty if their report turns out to be legitimate as determined by an open community voting process.

In the meantime, this new ad flagging system should help maintain ad quality and ensure that Presearchers are protected from bad actors looking to take advantage of the keyword staking platform.

Thanks to the Presearch #DevelopmentTeam  for launching this first feature of many to come from our recently published product roadmap. If you’d like to see the full roadmap and timeline for all our upcoming product updates, please check out the recently-published Presearch Vision Paper.

[mnixxo.crypto]

Integrated Search Experience and Rewards Evolution - Part I

In preparation for the launch of the new decentralized nodes-based Presearch Engine in Q4 of this year, we’re making some changes to the Presearch user experience in September, as announced in our recently published Vision Paper.



UX Refresh — New Integrated Search Experience

The first update, which will go live on August 31st, is a new integrated search experience on Dsearch, Presearch’s current default search results provider.

These changes will bring a tighter integration between the Presearch platform and the default search results page (currently powered by Dsearch). With this update, you will now be able to see your login status and PRE rewards balance directly on the Dsearch search results page. Your personal list of search providers (previously only available on the presearch.org home page) will now also be incorporated into the Dsearch results page for much more convenient navigation between search providers.



These providers will be displayed down the left side of the screen beneath the logo on desktop browsers, and across the top below the search bar on mobile devices.



This enables you to easily run your search using another provider if you don’t initially find what you’re looking for within the default search results. With just one click, you can now quickly re-run your query on Google, YouTube, or any of your other favorite search engines!

These improvements to the user experience will set the stage for the next changes we’re making to begin improving the project’s tokenomics.

[mnixxo.crypto]

Integrated Search Experience and Rewards Evolution - Part II

Changing the Default to Dsearch

Throughout the month of September, we will migrate all users over to Dsearch as their default search provider. If you are using Google currently as your default search engine, for example, your new default search results will come from Dsearch, though you can now click on any icon in your search providers bar on the results page to easily change the search engine on a per-query basis.

As discussed in the Presearch Vision Paper, with Presearch entering Phase II of the project, the focus is on creating sustainability and decentralization. A core part of the decentralization focus is giving users a privacy-protecting decentralized search engine (see our previous post on the upcoming search nodes release), but the other part is incentivizing users to stay on the platform and use the engine, driving stickiness of user experience and increasing advertising revenue to make the tokenomics sustainable.

The immediate result of this change is that instead of less than 10% of searches staying on the Presearch platform and featuring Presearch ads, by the end of September it will be more than 90%! We expect this to significantly increase the number of impressions and ad clicks, making every keyword staked considerably more valuable to our advertisers. We anticipate this to increase the number of advertisers, the amount of PRE staked, and demand for PRE overall.

This also provides an excellent opportunity to expose more users to the Presearch search experience and gather feedback prior to the launch of Presearch nodes.

Then, when the new decentralized nodes-based Presearch Engine launches to the public in Q4 of 2020, the transition will be seamless for users between Dsearch and the new nodes-based Presearch Engine.

Strengthening Token Economics

A significant portion of users are currently using Presearch to search Google, but with the improved Dsearch experience and in preparation for the launch of the new decentralized Presearch Engine, we are paving the way now for the transition and focusing more on improving the project’s already-strong tokenomics.

With Dsearch, there is an opportunity to display Presearch ads powered by the keyword staking platform, as well as to earn fiat revenue via outside ad networks that is reinvested back into the Presearch platform.

As discussed in the Vision Paper, Presearch intends to allocate a percentage of this revenue to purchasing PRE back from existing holders so that it can utilize this inventory to provide future rewards.

And, of course, we need as many eyeballs on the Presearch search results and ads as possible. This transition enables us to accomplish each of these objectives and to begin rolling out additional improvements to tokenomics for the PRE token.

[mnixxo.crypto]

Integrated Search Experience and Rewards Evolution - Part III

Reward Changes

As also described in the Vision Paper, The final part of this transition is to begin paying rewards only for searches run on Presearch’s default engine (currently Dsearch). With Presearch rolling out its own decentralized nodes-based search engine in Q4 and already having its own keyword staking-based advertising platform, it is important that the search rewards Presearch provides are aligned with the value to the community of those searches.

While we believe in choice and are making it easier than ever for users to search on other engines (by now integrating them for the first time directly into the search results page), we are moving towards tying reward payments directly to economic value received, and it simply no longer makes sense for Presearch to be paying PRE to send traffic away to external, competing search engines.

The amount of PRE paid per search on Dsearch will currently remain the same as before, with the intent for the rewards payouts to become more dynamic and directly tied to economic value as we roll out our Tokenomics Engine later in Q4.

Delivering Value Back to the Community

These changes drive value into the Presearch project by having more users leverage the Presearch search results, increasing advertising revenue, and eventually being able to tie PRE rewards to actual value (searches and ad views within the Presearch platform) instead of paying to divert traffic to other sites. Ultimately, this makes the Presearch platform more financially sustainable, increases investment in the decentralized search platform and the quality of search results, and makes the entire search experience more integrated and compelling.

In summary, we are rolling out the following changes:
1. A more integrated search results experience
2. Dsearch as the default search provider
3. Rewards changes to incentivize on-platform searches.

The integrated search results experience will roll out on 8/31, with the remaining changes occurring gradually throughout the month of September, starting on the 1st. Some people will receive the experience right away while others may receive it within days or weeks.

We’re really excited about these improvements and the benefits for searchers and other community members, ahead of the release of Presearch search nodes! These changes have been a long time in the making and we are pleased that we are delivering on our roadmap as promised and providing an even stronger token ecosystem that will benefit all who own PRE.

If you have any feedback about the changes, we welcome you to use the ‘Send Feedback’ link on the menu in the top right corner of Presearch.org.

[mnixxo.crypto]

Join our CEO Colin Pape next Tuesday on Zoom for a live video AMA!

Take this opportunity to ask all the questions you have!

We'd love to see you and we're looking forward to sharing some product demos with you.

The AMA will run for about an hour at: https://presearch.zoom.us/j/4451389661?pwd=M0JmcUJMUkZuWkVTNkVGQ05hVWRlUT09

[mnixxo.crypto]

High ETH gas fees, withdrawal delays, and options moving forward

Dear Presearchers,

Some of you may have noticed a delay in PRE withdrawals recently. We’d like to discuss some of the challenges we are working through as we move toward a solution.

Currently, PRE counts thousands of on-chain token holders. This number has been increasing rapidly as our user base continues to grow, with more than 1.6 million registered users currently.

Every month, we process hundreds of withdrawals for our users. We’ve covered the gas fees for these withdrawals since 2017, which wasn’t a problem as fees were usually around $0.10. However, with the increasing popularity for the Ethereum Network and DeFi projects, fees for ERC-20 token transactions have recently been costing up to $10 per transaction.

As you can imagine, these costs are exorbitant and unsustainable. One hundred transactions now costs $1,000 USD. This is not economically viable for transactions of 1,000 PRE, as it means we’re paying $10 in transaction fees for $20 worth of tokens (50% fees).

We are constantly monitoring Ethereum gas costs and are taking advantage of any drops in cost to push through outstanding withdrawals. Because this has been a sustained increase recently, however, it’s been challenging to keep up with the queue of withdrawal requests while simultaneously managing timing of transactions to control these volatile costs, and so we’ve built up a bit of a backlog.

We are not the only project to encounter these challenges, and we are all trying to determine the best way to handle these unprecedented costs as they truly wreak havoc with the business models we have established. This is not a 50% or even 500% increase in fees, we are talking about a 5,000% increase in costs.

While we are navigating these challenges, we ask for your patience and are writing to formally communicate that it is not realistic for Presearch to be able to honor the previous 72 hour withdrawal expectation until we establish a new path forward, which may include one or more of the following:
- A return to average gas fees (somewhere in the $0.25 — $0.50 range) driven by market forces
- Passing along gas costs to those requesting withdrawals (either in whole or in part)
- Implementing a new blockchain with lower transaction costs
- Batching transactions in a different way to reduce transaction fees — this could include facilitating internal transactions that enable holders to sell / transfer PRE to other holders within the Presearch ecosystem

We realize that this is a major inconvenience for our users, and we apologize sincerely for this situation. The blockchain space is new, and we are all encountering challenges and developing solutions together.

We are actively working through the best way to handle this scenario for the good of the project and all of our stakeholders. If you have any ideas or feedback you’d like to provide as we’re working through solutions, please feel free to reach out, as we appreciate community feedback and always consider it strongly in our decision-making process.

We will make a decision on how best handle this transaction fee challenge by the middle of September, and in the meantime, will push forward — identifying strategic opportunities to process transactions and doing our best to minimize fees while working through the queue of withdrawal requests.

Once again, we apologize for the delays and appreciate your patience and understanding.

Sincerely,
Team Presearch

[mnixxo.crypto]

PRE Withdrawals Update

Massive spikes in gas costs that are paid when transfers are completed have made it uneconomical and downright wasteful to distribute reward payments — it really doesn’t make sense to spend $10 to send $20 worth of rewards.

We are writing today with an update to inform you that we’ve been busy implementing changes to our withdrawal system to minimize the transaction fees paid, and we anticipate that these will be pushed live before the end of September, enabling us to resume withdrawals next week.

Changes we’re working on will help to mitigate the effect of high transaction fees, both those currently experienced as well as those we may encounter in the future. These changes include:

- A new process that monitors ETH gas costs and sends transactions at opportune times when fees are lowest

- The ability to send more transactions, faster, to take advantage of low gas cost opportunities

- Better queuing of transactions to limit complications when gas costs spike and transactions get ‘stuck’

In order to take advantage of these new capabilities, we need the ability to have withdrawals sit ‘in wait’, until target gas costs are reached. This means we can unfortunately no longer commit to reward withdrawals being processed within 72 hours.

Transactions will now go out as soon as possible, but with no set time-frame, as successful transactions are dependent on the load on the Ethereum network and the associated transaction costs.

Those withdrawals that have already been requested but have not yet been fulfilled will go out in the order in which they have been submitted, so there’s no need for anyone waiting on their PRE tokens to do anything.

Your tokens will be sent ASAP, and we will post an update as soon as we begin processing withdrawal requests after we have released our new withdrawal system next week.

Please note that once the new withdrawal system goes live, purchased and deposited tokens will still be processed within the previous 72-hour withdrawal window. This post is specifically addressing rewards withdrawals and not purchased/deposited tokens.

Thank you all sincerely for your patience while we work through this challenge. We appreciate your continued support and belief in Presearch and our mission to build a decentralized search engine.

[mnixxo.crypto]

KuCoin Security Incident and Presearch

Fellow Presearchers,

It has come to our attention that KuCoin, a cryptocurrency marketplace that enables the buying and selling of PRE tokens, has suffered from what appears to be a significant hack and subsequent loss of funds.

Unfortunately, it appears that Presearch tokens were affected, and approximately 26m PRE have been moved from KuCoin’s hot wallets to an outside wallet containing more than $150m worth of tokens from dozens of projects, which KuCoin has requested that we blacklist.

We have been in touch with Probit and HitBTC to request that they halt deposits, withdrawals and the exchange of PRE until this is all sorted out.

It would appear that the best way to handle this situation will be to complete a token swap to roll back the transfer of the stolen PRE. If we decide that this is indeed the best course of action, then any wallets holding PRE that have not interacted with the wallet associated with the theft (https://etherscan.io/token/0x88a3e4f35d64aad41a6d4030ac9afe4356cb84fa?a=0xeb31973e0febf3e3d7058234a5ebbae1ab4b8c23) would be eligible to exchange their current PRE tokens for the new PRE tokens that would be created.

All PRE held within the Presearch.org site or our crowd sale portal and PRE staked on keyword ads would be unaffected by the token swap.

We advise those who hold PRE on exchanges to immediately cease buying and selling PRE until we have a resolution and communication with each exchange in order to be eligible to participate in whatever swaps the exchanges offer to their users.

Please bear with us as we navigate the challenges posed by this situation. We believe that KuCoin has good intentions, though we cannot verify their statements about insurance coverage or the ability to retrieve funds or absorb losses. We are hopeful that they will be able to continue to push forward and that they will be able to make good on the commitments they’ve made to compensate users.

We appreciate your patience and support and will be in regular contact with community members, including another statement on Monday to pass along updates and instructions as they become available.