Presearch ICO - Review

Today the Presearch company started distributing its tokens to the crowd. We'll be analyzing it through our ICO Valuation methodology.

What is Presearch

Presearch is a company aiming to build a decentralized search engine hoping to bite some portion of Google's market share, the market giant.

They correctly state that Google uses your personal data (search history, location, preferences etc) to leverage their other business and they also state that Google is not as impartial as it claims to be. Even though I'm not sure about the latter, they show their sources:

As Google has become a multi-billion dollar business that answers to Wall Street, their ethos seems to have shifted from the early days people remember them by. They have become known for promoting their own properties at the expense of alternatives, appropriating others’ info and operating in secrecy, all of which is blamed on ‘the algorithm’. The reality is that they manually manipulate results while hiding behind their algorithm and justifying all changes as being ‘best for the user’. It’s not an ideal environment.

Business Model

They will reward people who use, contribute and promote the search engine with the company's tokens. Thus the engine will be paying you back for owning your data (like location, search history and others). The data will be publicly available as will the search engine methods, in such way that all websites have a fair chance of fighting for a highlight position.

The Market

Well, Google.

The Team

As usual, we advise a thorough look at the team for further analysis, since good ideas are worthless without good execution.

The teams credentials seem to be in order. No Scam Flags on my sight. They all look like real hard-working people, with programming and business experience. One thing calls for attention though: None of them claim to have any experience with search engines. You'd imagine a former Google/Yahoo engineer would be key to such a project and they seem to lack one.

Token Value Proposal

The token owners will be able to vote in company developments, thus driving its future. The token will grow in value when and if more people are interested in driving the company's future. Also it can be used to advertise.

Final Comments

One thing that truly bothers me with the project is that they aim to be a search engine. What makes google so special to all of us is their search engine capabilities. They allow us to quickly find resolutions to the problems we're googling for.

Even though all the abovementioned, they do not seem to focus on it. Their first step will be creating a search tool. That is described basically as a gateway to other search engines, in other words a platform that either googles or yahoos it for you (and several other engines). They have no plan so far about how the search engine is gonna be developed, and they consider it to be a second stage which we should not be concerned right now.

From their white paper:

From a Search Tool to a Search Engine

As mentioned a number of times throughout this document, and in conclusion to the Product section of the white paper, we wanted to reiterate that this is a multi-stage project, and that building a fully-decentralized search engine from scratch at this time is premature due to a rapidly-changing technology landscape that is seeing new solutions come to market almost daily.

As such, we subscribe to the belief that we need to take baby steps and start small with the search tool model. This incarnation of the vision establishes openness and transparency in search, while minimizing the need to build our own index.

Over time, as the community grows, distributed technology evolves, and more and more Internet users become Power Internet Users, we can empower these trends with a platform that is constantly improving and iterating at the hands, hearts and minds of the community.

This transition may take significant time, or may be surprisingly quick. At this point, we do not want to set the expectation that it will quick, and for the purposes of this white paper remain primarily focused on the vision for a decentralized search engine while leveraging the early model for the search tool described in this document.

This means so far an engine has not been developed. It is, thus, a total greenfield project.

On the other hand their marketing initiatives seems pretty decent, they even showed up on CNBC.

Conclusion

I really love the concept of a decentralized search engine. It is one of those services that should be decentralized. As good as the idea sounds, I think I'll be sitting this one out.

There are two main issues in my view. The first one is that a company that hopes to get some of Google's market share, by offering a service at least as good as Google's should have something to show for before asking for my money, like some sort of search engine model. At least it should point out why its team is capable of matching their quality with the resources they aim to raise.

The second one is that the token value proposal isn't very appealing to me. I mean, take Status (a company whose tokens are similar to Presearch's) for example: One might really want their tokens because they want to offer their company's services on the platform, thus they will be willing to pay a lot of money to drive Status' future. But I don't see people really willing to pay for a say in Presearch's future. Also, about the advertising, the market is dominated by agencies and service providers, and we already have a blockchain competitor that is Brave's Basic Attention Token (BAT).

I'd love to see Presearch adoption sky rocketing, I'm just not sure I can profit from it.

Done !

Hope it helps ! My opinion has been a bit controversial among my friends, so I'd really appreciate hearing some opinions of Presearch investors.

Cheers !