https://www.presearch.io/vision.pdf
I read the Presearch vision paper and I think it will be a very successful project. I believe in their mission to create a search engine that respects privacy, has fair search results, and rewards you with some beer money (in the form of the PRE cryptocurrency). I also found the tokenomics very fascinating, like a little self-contained ecosystem.
PRE Token
What will this little guy be used for?
Rewarding users for searching. Currently, it is set to 0.25 PRE per search. We are of course greedy and want lots of rewards, but I believe they will make a change on how PRE is awarded. It will likely be based on how valuable your search was to the Presearch ecosystem. Despite our unlimited desire for more PRE, this change will help the project be sustainable long term. And that will be good for your PRE tokens.
Keyword staking by advertisers. Advertisers will compete to stake the most PRE for the keywords where they want to show their ad. This model will likely be tweaked, possibly by also requiring some $$$. Or maybe just $, since they already bought the PRE.
Rewarding those who stake PRE to operate nodes, gateways, and TIE fighters. Some nodes will be used for indexing, crawling, searching, and whatever else the internet does.
Challenges
Competing with big tech like Google (2). They have the money and ability to make their search engine the default search engine in your browser. And lets face it, we are lazy. A lot of us are too lazy to change our settings. But I believe enough users, who want a search engine like Presearch, will switch.
PRE search rewards are currently suffering from two issues. First, ETH gas prices require your kidney before you can actually do anything like withdraw your PRE tokens. Second, there is an algorithm that aims to eliminate bots and other users trying to exploit the search rewards. It will be difficult to make that algorithm completely accurate. There may be some users that are flagged as suspicious even though they are just heavy users.
These challenges may scare off some first timers. I do believe these problems will be solved over time. For example, the vision paper already talks about possible ways to use or lend your PRE tokens without having to withdraw to an external wallet. That would be a way to avoid the gas fee.
I have already made Presearch my main search engine and I'm part of the beta group to host a node. If you want to try it out, please use my referral so that I become like Pacman and eat all the PRE - https://presearch.org/signup?rid=2108472
Feel free to check out other non-Presearch referrals here - https://invitation.codes/@j_wowza.