New Opportunities for Search Engines: When AI Meets Web 3.0 - Can Presearch Rise from the Ashes?

Author: Iris Chen, Dr. Nick

The rapid advancement of artificial intelligence technology has brought revolutionary changes to search engines. OpenAI's entry into the search engine field challenges giants like GOOGLE, potentially causing a revolutionary impact on the industry and bringing new opportunities for Web3.0 AI search engines. The core values of Web3.0—decentralization, user sovereignty, and data privacy—are reshaping the future of the internet. The combination of Web3.0 and AI search engines will give rise to a fairer, more transparent, and efficient way of information retrieval, breaking the monopoly of traditional search engines and empowering users with greater control.

1. Development Trends of Web3.0 Search Engines

Currently, multiple sources confirm that OpenAI is about to launch the ChatGPT search engine, challenging Google Search!

(1) A Major Challenge from OpenAI to Google: When Search Meets AI

At present, the top three search engines globally are Google, Bing, and Yahoo, with Google dominating the market with about 90% market share. Since the advent of the internet era, search engines have evolved from simple keyword matching to semantic understanding. However, traditional search engines represented by Google still have many limitations that restrict users' freedom and control in obtaining information:

• Data Monopoly and Privacy Breaches: Traditional search engine companies hold vast amounts of user data, building enormous business empires on it. User data is collected, analyzed, and utilized without transparency and control, leading to serious privacy breaches and data misuse issues, such as targeted advertising and user profiling, infringing on users' privacy rights.

• Centralized Control and Algorithmic Bias: The algorithms and ranking mechanisms of traditional search engines are opaque and susceptible to human intervention and algorithmic bias, resulting in search results lacking objectivity and fairness. For example, search results may be influenced by commercial interests, prioritizing paid advertisements or specific website content over the information that best meets user needs.

• Information Bubbles and Content Homogenization: Personalized recommendation algorithms may lead users into information bubbles, exposing them to increasingly singular information and lacking diverse viewpoints and sources. This is detrimental to users' ability to obtain comprehensive information and may exacerbate social division and polarization.

As a leading company in the field of artificial intelligence, OpenAI's entry into the search engine domain is of great significance and may disrupt the existing landscape:

• OpenAI possesses leading technological advantages in natural language processing and deep learning, with its GPT series models excelling in understanding and generating text. This will bring stronger semantic understanding capabilities to search engines, improving the relevance and accuracy of search results, and may enable more natural and intelligent search interactions;

• OpenAI's technology can better analyze user behavior and preferences, providing more personalized search results and customizing user interfaces and features, thereby enhancing user experience and satisfaction;

• OpenAI may explore new search modes and interaction methods, such as conversational search and multimodal search, bringing new development directions to the industry.

(2) New Opportunities for Web3.0 Search Engines: When Web3.0 Meets AI

Although artificial intelligence (AI) technology has brought revolutionary advancements to search engines, issues such as data bias and algorithm transparency still exist. Blockchain technology and the Web3.0 concept provide new ideas and solutions for these problems.

2. Related Projects of Web3.0 Search Engines

The integration of Web3.0 and AI technology will give rise to a new generation of search engines that will place greater emphasis on user privacy protection, data security, algorithm transparency, and decentralized governance. Current Web3.0 search engine projects include Presearch, Brave, Adot, KaitoAI, YaCy, and Xayn.

• Presearch: Presearch provides users with more control over search results. It operates on node servers run by community members, offering better results while protecting user privacy. Users receive encrypted tokens for searching and contributing to the community. Presearch has good development prospects but needs to strengthen technological innovation and market competitiveness to maintain its leading position in a competitive market.

• Brave Search: The default search engine for Brave browser users, built on its independent web index, does not rely on Google, Bing, or other major search engines. It is currently the most popular independent search engine, but Brave's level of decentralization is relatively low.

• Adot: Adot aims to create a decentralized data marketplace and knowledge graph, utilizing AI technology to provide semantic understanding and intelligent search functions. Adot has an advanced technical architecture, but the project is still in its early stages and needs time to build a complete ecosystem and attract more users.

• KaitoAI: KaitoAI focuses on semantic search and intelligent Q&A, using natural language processing and knowledge graph technology to provide users with more accurate and personalized search results. However, KaitoAI is also an early-stage project that needs time to accumulate data and improve technology to gain a competitive advantage in the market.

• YaCy: YaCy is an established open-source search engine project that uses a P2P network architecture, featuring high customization and privacy protection. However, YaCy's user interface and search experience are relatively poor, lacking the application of AI technology, making it difficult to meet modern users' needs for search engines.

• Xayn: Xayn employs federated learning technology to provide personalized search results while protecting user privacy. However, Xayn is still in its early stages, and its technical architecture and business model are not yet clear.

The key competition among various Web3.0 AI search engines in the future will unfold in the following areas, with the first to achieve its goals gaining a competitive edge.

• Innovation in Multimodal Search and Interaction Methods: Search engines will support richer search methods and interaction modes, such as voice search, image search, and virtual reality search. Future search engine optimization will include spatial computing, such as the metaverse and virtual reality, to enhance human-computer interaction.

• Deep Integration of Semantic Web and Knowledge Graphs: Search engines will be able to better understand the relationships between information, providing more precise and comprehensive search results.

• Personalized and Customized Search Experience: Search engines will provide customized search results and recommended content based on users' personalized needs.

• Decentralized and Community-Driven Development Models: Users will participate in the governance and development of search engines, jointly creating a fairer, more transparent, and efficient future information retrieval method.

3. Presearch: Can It Rise from the Ashes?

If Web3.0 becomes the core of the next generation of the internet, it will certainly need its own "GOOGLE" based on Web3.0 architecture to meet users' demands for data privacy and decentralized search, providing a huge market opportunity for Presearch.

(1) Bold Restructuring

Since its establishment in 2017, Presearch has been continuously improving and developing, achieving considerable success, such as becoming the default search engine for new Android devices sold in Europe in 2021, with registered users increasing by 108% year-on-year that year. However, in the subsequent bear market, like other Web3.0 projects, Presearch faced difficulties such as funding shortages, team reductions, and slow product iterations. At the same time, compared to industry leader Brave Search, there is a significant gap in user numbers and revenue scale.

To catch up with competitors and realize the vision of becoming "the Google of the Web3 decentralized era," the project underwent bold reforms, introducing the Digital Capital team to strengthen the driving force of artificial intelligence technology, improve the technical architecture, and accelerate AI-centered product development and market expansion. Significant progress has been made on both the product and market fronts.

• Digital Capital Team: The CEO, CFO, AI head, and project manager have all been replaced by the Digital Capital team. The CEO, Tim Enneking, is expected to bring his rich management experience, investment funds, and industry connections to the project.

• Core AI Development: Trey Grainger, a Stanford University graduate and expert in AI search engines, is the author of "AI-Powered Search" and is the most active developer on Presearch's GitHub.

• Chief Product Officer: Jeff Hunt, founder of the search project Scout, became Presearch's Chief Product Officer after Presearch acquired Scout at the end of 2023.

• Data Scientist: Joshua Paul Barnard, a graduate of Johns Hopkins University, is dedicated to creating and enhancing AI chatbots with coding capabilities.

(2) Product Side: Focus on Developing AI Products

The restructured Presearch team, now significantly strengthened, is rapidly enhancing the intelligence level of the search engine using blockchain technology and artificial intelligence, greatly improving user experience and search result quality. The Web3.0 architecture based on decentralized node deployment makes Presearch more adaptable to integrating third-party decentralized AI models, computing power, and data, giving it a certain inherent advantage over competitors in building the future decentralized search engine. According to community information, the project will also release a new generation white paper based on the latest developments, indicating that the project is approaching a new milestone.

Starting in 2023, the project began integrating AI-driven results into its search engine and joined NVIDIA Inception in October 2023, concurrently acquiring the professional search project Scout to help Presearch accelerate the construction and promotion of the next generation of decentralized AI search. As of now, its core product, pregptAi, has been in development for nearly a year, and since August 2023, it has started providing AI search based on ChatGPT, with plans to launch its own AI chatbot based on decentralized computing power in 2024.

At the same time, Presearch is improving its blockchain architecture based on Cosmos, leveraging Cosmos's advantages in interoperability, scalability, ease of development, and security to establish the Depin hardware foundation for the AI era.

Next, the project will continue to develop high-quality AI or meta-AI search integrations. Presearch will concentrate thousands of AI service providers to offer the best search results. For example, after the API becomes available, it will add large models like GrorkX, GPT4, and llama, and even utilize proprietary datasets to improve search results. By using decentralized nodes to access APIs, results will be returned to users from a multitude of AI services, all while maintaining anonymity and privacy.

In the future, it may support richer search methods and interaction modes, such as voice search, image search, and virtual reality search, supporting spatial computing, the metaverse, and virtual reality to enhance human-computer interaction.

Key achievements to date include:

• Launching a new AI product: PreGPTMVP, which fundamentally changes AI chatbots through decentralized computing power and privacy.

• Participation in NVIDIA Inception: Joining this program in 2023 will help accelerate the construction and promotion of the next generation of decentralized AI search and provide opportunities to collaborate with industry-leading experts and other AI-driven organizations.

• Acquisition of Scout Search: The acquisition of Scout Search in 2023 provides Presearch the opportunity to offer search services to a new demographic seeking safer online exploration, laying the foundation for the application of the project's cutting-edge technology in enterprises.

(3) Market Side: Rapid Growth in Users and Revenue

After the restructuring of the new team, the project has made increasingly significant progress in market development and monetization.

• Registered users have reached 4.5 million, with 1.1 million monthly active users, and total daily searches consistently exceeding 800,000.

• As of May 2024, 355.59 million PRE tokens have been staked, approaching half of the total supply.

• The project's revenue is growing rapidly, with the PTA price rising by 33%, and revenue doubling in the first three months, with an expected 500% growth in the first half of the year. As of May 1, revenue exceeded that of April and may double again.

  

(4) Token Economics:

The ERC20 token issued by Presearch is $PRE, which is currently planned to migrate to Cosmos. The maximum technical supply of PRE tokens is set at 1 billion tokens, with the current supply at 750 million. As of May 8, Presearch's circulating market cap is approximately $11 million, with an FDV of about $16 million.

PRE tokens have various uses within the Presearch platform, such as paying for search fees, rewarding content contributors, and participating in community governance, which endows PRE tokens with real value and liquidity.

The token contract allows for minting and burning tokens, and the project plans to return up to 20% of its revenue to users and node operators in the form of increased platform rewards, token buybacks, or marketing activities to support the project and its surrounding community.

4. Conclusion

The rapid advancement of artificial intelligence technology has brought revolutionary changes to search engines and provided significant market opportunities for Presearch. To seize the revolutionary new opportunities brought by AI to search engines and occupy the competitive high ground of Web3.0 search engines, Presearch made significant strategic adjustments in mid-2023, strengthening the driving force of artificial intelligence technology and optimizing its blockchain architecture. Currently, significant progress has been made on both the product and market fronts. The major transformations of Presearch are not yet fully completed, and the product experience still has considerable distance compared to industry leaders. Although revenue growth is rapid, the absolute amount is not high, we look forward to it ultimately rising from the ashes after a bold restructuring.

5. Risk Warning:

Market Risk: The cryptocurrency market is highly volatile, and the price of PRE tokens may be affected by market sentiment and overall trends.

Project Development Risk: Presearch is still in the development stage, and there is considerable uncertainty regarding its technological development, market expansion, and business model innovation.

Competitive Risk: The search engine market is highly competitive, and Presearch faces competitive pressure from mainstream search engines.