Presearch Weekly News & Updates #149 — December 8th, 2023

Presearch

4 min readDec 8, 2023

This Week in Review

Find out about the latest progress with Presearch this week! Let’s start with the highlights…

330 million PRE staked!
PRE value ~$0.033 / 0.75 bits
CMC = 845, CG = 1,050
80k staked / 65.8k active nodes
Dev: new design work, monetization, bug fixes, Cosmos roadmap
Weekly Wins
Scout acquisition complete!
New node role discussion
Marketing, traffic & monetization update
Community questions

Weekly Wins

We make great progress every week, but these are the Weekly Wins we’re most excited about!

Presearch acquires Scout search engine!
Scout Founder, Jeff Hunt, joins Presearch as Chief Product Officer!
MASQ browser makes Presearch sole default search engine
Agreement signed to add Bing text ads to Presearch!
9 new PTAs including gTrade
New redirect URL for affiliate links
Brenden’s band, The Latin Dead, nominated by NPR as one of 50 best albums- congrats, man!

Scout acquisition

Tim is putting his years of M&A experience to use, adding some very interesting technology, experience and talent to Presearch with this week’s acquisition of Scout@

Welcome to Jeff Hunt, Scout founder
Jeff is the founder and CEO of Scout, and is based in Texas. As an early Google employee from 2001–2004, Jeff knows what it’s like to rapidly scale a search engine.
Jeff is joining Presearch to help lead our product development efforts as Chief Product Officer.
We are very excited to have him on the team!
Welcome as well to Scout’s investors and developer network
In addition to Jeff, Scout has some great investors, developers and other talented and mission-aligned people within their network, and we are excited to welcome them to the Presearch family as well!
What is Scout?
Scout is an alternative search engine powered by crowd-ranked results, using Al, with a focus on the education space.
Scout has a number of pilots with schools in the US and Western Europe, and we see this as a big opportunity for Presearch that we can build upon.
Scout has taken a privacy-centric approach that aligns with Presearch, and we see a tremendous fit for Presearch’s upcoming Community Search Engine offering within the education space.
More acquisitions to come?
The alternative search space is ripe with opportunity to bring talent, technology and capital together under a brand and economic model that can compete with Big Tech. Stay tuned for more.

Marketing & Monetization update

We’re spreading the word to drive more users and increase the number of searches!

Presearch to be default search engine in MASQ browser
MASQ is a desktop-based Web3 privacy browser for Windows, Mac and Linux, with great freedom-supporting features like a mesh-based VPN, web3 wallet, and an app ecosystem to help replace big tech. You can also earn MASQ tokens when you participate in the network. Check them out! Presearch will be default as of version v0.8.5.
Merch + Contests
Jefferson has been working with Brad from CurrencyHub.io to set up some cool customization functionality for Presearch merch, including the ability to have a QR code added with a link to your affiliate URL. This merch will tie in with some contests that are in the works.
PTA outreach ramping up
The Telegram outreach team, lead by Darwin, is ramping up outreach to crypto projects about Takeover Ads. Contact darwin@presearch.io if you’d like to help. We are also ramping up email-based outreach using the automated Al platform.
Traffic stabilization
Traffic continues to stabilize after the issues experienced last week. We are continuing to monitor growth to ensure that we prevent scraping of results without impacting the user experience of legitimate users. Searches were in the 2–2.5m per day range this week.
We’ve been approved to run Bing text ads!
The team is integrating Bing text ads into the platform in a way that provides significant monetization potential while still respecting user privacy. This is primarily how DuckDuckGo monetizes, and we have been trying for years to get approved. Very excited about the potential here!
Lots more PTAs coming in
gTrade, Wine.com, Dyson, Ledger, eToro & others -
both paid and under affiliate terms.
Growth marketing team
We’re continuing to align the growth marketing team and are wrapping up some of the major foundational improvements needed ahead of real growth marketing.