Search and ye shall … most likely be tracked.
But a growing number of people want to search without leaving a trail, which is why privacy-focused search engines like DuckDuckGo and Brave Search are gaining more traction.
DuckDuckGo, for example, is now the fifth most popular search engine worldwide as of July, according to Statcounter. (Not too shabby, although it’s worth noting that DuckDuckGo’s market share is vanishingly small – less than 1% – compared to Google, which has nearly 90% of the worldwide search market.)
Google’s search dominance is a function of its tight integration with Chrome. DuckDuckGo and Brave Search also connect their private search engines to browsers, albeit ones designed specifically to block trackers and minimize data collection.
But Presearch is taking a different approach.
It describes itself as an “ethical, non-profiling meta-search engine,” which is a mouthful, but basically means that it never tracks users and, rather than being tied to a traditional browser, operates on a decentralized network powered by its community of users that rewards them with its own cryptocurrency tokens – called PRE – in exchange for running searches.
That doesn’t sound like the sort of company that would also have an advertising business, but it most certainly does.
So I sat down with Presearch CEO Tim Enneking to understand how the heck it works.
AdExchanger: How would you describe Presearch in a nutshell, but without using the phrase “ethical, non-profiling meta-search engine”?
TIM ENNEKING: It’s not that jargony if you take the pieces apart! “Meta” refers to the fact that Presearch connects to just over 130 search engines. When you do a search with us, we pull from multiple other search engines and aggregate the results in one place.
We also have a decentralized or distributed architecture with around 40,000 nodes worldwide. Searches are routed through different nodes, making it impossible to profile users or track search habits.
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And we consider ourselves ethical, because we have no data on any of our users. Even when someone sets up a Presearch account and we have their email address, it’s not tied to a URL or an ISP or an IP address.
So, are you like a VPN for search or, how do I put this, a condom for Chrome?
Essentially, yes.
Who are your users?
We have a lot of “crypto natives,” but we also have a lot of people we consider “tech forward” people. You don’t have to care about or know about crypto to use our search engine.
Recently, we’ve started pivoting more toward non-crypto people, because that’s a much bigger audience. We’re trying to appeal to more demographics in general. So, yes, we skew male and single, but we also have a lot of women users.
Right now, we’ve got about 115,000 monthly active users, we see roughly half a million searches a day and we generate more than 13 million impressions.
Why did you decide to launch an ads business?
The prior management got a bunch of money during the ICO craze in 2017 and 2018 and so for the first six years of this project, until I got involved, there was no monetization at all. But when the money ran out it was like, “Well, boys, it’s time.”
But we warred with our decision. Our users don’t necessarily want advertising, but I do think people understand that it’s inevitable in many cases.
How do you balance the need to generate revenue, including through ads, with your commitment to user privacy and decentralization?
By being respectful. Our motto is: Ads as art.
For example, we have takeover ads that are like background wallpaper for the homepage. They’re big and they’re impactful, so advertisers like them, but we’ve gotten virtually no complaints from users, because these ads don’t change the experience.
We also have keyword ads, which is where advertisers rent keywords by staking PRE tokens and pay a 1% monthly fee to move their result into the third position. We have no ads at the top of our results.
What does that look like in practice?
For example, say you stake 1,000 PRE tokens on exact matches for the word “drone” and then you pay 10 tokens monthly to rank higher. But if you’re outbid, you get notified and you can raise your stake, which sometimes sparks a bidding war.
We prefer longer, more specific keywords to keep the accuracy as high as possible – so “anti-drone system” versus just “drone” – but it’s always about results first, meaning users see at least two completely unfiltered and unbiased search results before they see any keyword-staked ads.
That’s interesting, but I don’t think it’s for everyone. What type of advertisers do you work with?
We had an agency with Macy’s as a client and they wanted to do something with us, but we actually went back and said, “Look, guys, Macy’s is a lovely store, but we don’t think this is going to be a successful campaign, because we just don’t have the right demo for you.”
We get a lot of companies with new tech products, new token launches, events are a big one, and we’ve also seen a lot of interest from newsletters, actually. TLDR, for example, really likes us. They do these daily very brief summary-style newsletters about startups and tech and programming, which makes sense for our audience.
Are you worried or excited about the rise of AI search?
It’s an existential threat, and to address that we’re building an MCP layer – model context protocol – that will feed into agentic AI.
It’ll be a proprietary search engine using a decentralized crawler, index and AI nodes. We’ve already got this running in beta. Also, unlike other search engines that just bolt AI on top, we’re building ours so AI models are integrated right into the search infrastructure.
Do you see a future where privacy-centric platforms like Presearch ever become mainstream, or will you guys remain a niche alternative?
We’ll stay niche for a while, and I do think there are certain limits to how much we can grow because, let’s face it, most people search on Google. But of course we see opportunity. I mean, it’s one of the reasons why we’re launching our own proprietary search engine.
Answers have been lightly edited and condensed.
🙏 Thanks for reading! Did you know there’s actually a way to keep track of cat-themed crypto coins? (!) As always, feel free to drop me a line at allison@adexchanger.com with any comments or feedback.
