Presearch Project – Taking on GOOGLE!!!
by Avi Gable | Jul 13, 2017 | Blockchain - My Thoughts | 2 comments
Presearch ProjectAs I began researching the Presearch project and their upcoming ICO, I went to the same place I always do, the whitepaper. As I began reading through it I was a bit captivated as the issue they are attempting to address is probably one that all of us are concerned about, The King, Google.
I am looking forward to writing a full profile of Presearch and their upcoming ICO, but I feel a need to put a few words out there now. This is definitely something you should look into further and form your own opinion.
Why Create the Presearch Project
I think a lot of us are concerned with the dominance of Google, as a search engine. Google directs us through many of our everyday life needs, endeavors and much more. Needless to say that Google, along with their ownership of Youtube and their Gmail platform knows, if I may say, more about us than we do. How does Google use that information? Are they truly guiding us through the web to the places that are for our benefit first or theirs? Google controls 77% of all search traffic and it is a little scary.
The whitepaper explains how the internet was originally created to be a decentralized platform for users to interact. Even more so Google with its ‘do no evil’ mantra, Google built an unprecedented degree of trust with users. I will leave you with a quote from the whitepaper which I apologize is longer than I would like, but I think raises a real issue. I will have my complete profile on the Presearch project done in a couple of days and look forward to your opinion.
“While there are a number of alternative search engines, Yahoo / Bing and Baidu being the largest, and a number of smaller engines such as DuckDuckGo, YaCy (peer 2 peer), Gigablast and others, there is little usage and innovation (except maybe DuckDuckGo), and Google dominates search.
Currently, for 77% of all trips onto this highway, everyone is squeezing through a single ramp. This extreme degree of centralization has had two main negative effects:
- The ‘stops’ along the highway: content producers, webmasters, marketers and businesses, organizations, etc., are all extremely crowded alongside that ramp, fighting to be seen, paying more than $50 billion per year for scraps of attention.
- Those who control the single on-ramp are in a position of extreme power and privilege as the directors of traffic and have the ability to increasingly lock in their position, ensuring their ultimate long-term dominance.
Having one company in this position of extreme power is particularly troublesome because it enables them to operate in a very opaque, top-down, almost-oligarchical manner.
With great power comes great responsibility; a responsible gatekeeper would recognize the need to be continually more accountable, open and provably fair.
Unfortunately, Google appears to be abdicating their responsibility as the primary gatekeeper of the Internet by becoming increasingly secretive and taking few steps to become more transparent, 9 10 11 despite having more than 15 years as the dominant search engine and billions of dollars in capital. They default to ‘just trust us’ messaging in place of processes, information, and communication and hide behind their algorithm, justifying their secrecy by blaming hackers and spammers who would take advantage of any information they share.”
