How Web3 can disrupt Google and the game of SEO

Transcript

gmgm welcome to web 3 academy a place for entrepreneurs businesses and creators to explore and learn how to use web3 to transform business models and build thriving communities this is jaybird and i'm here with kyle readhead and we're here to keep you on the forefront of technology so that you don't get left behind friends we've got an episode for you today we'll be talking about a lot of exciting things let me just run through a few what happens to seo when we move from online to on chain does seo die what's the future we're going to find out

search to earn forget about google here's how you can earn tokens searching in web 3. the scary realities of user privacy and how decentralization puts ownership and safety back in your hands and finally we're going to touch on freedom and mostly freedom from big tech which i think we all want and we're going to get there together before we get into this we need your help with one thing we want to get simple web3 education out to as many people as possible and we've learned that in order to do that in order to grow our podcast and get in front of the masses we need more

people subscribing and following it's a small step for you but it makes a huge impact for us so if you're listening please pull out your phone on your laptop on your desktop and just do one simple click for us click follow on apple podcast we're on spotify or subscribe on youtube it will make a big difference we're so so grateful for you each and every one of our listeners thanks so much let's get billions onto web three together all right do you know what today is it's the doers spotlight and we've got colin pape with us from pre-search

hey colin let me give you a little intro here so stoked to have him a man cohen is the founder of community driven and decentralized search engine pre-search cohn has been in the search space for more than 20 years and previously founded shopcity.com a network of local marketplaces where he had an encounter with google that opened his eyes to the negative effects of big tech and led him to the opportunity to create an alternative to google using blockchain colin welcome to the show hey thanks for having me jay thanks kyle so excited to have you so before we get into the the story of uh

what happened and how you had your encounter with google because i think we definitely want to jump into that but before we do that we always like to start the show with the same question which is what's your rabbit hole story uh and maybe there's crossover between the two stories or maybe it started with one of your friends just telling you to buy bitcoin some years ago but how did you first go down the rabbit hole what first caught your interest uh and and really why why did you decide to uh to go and continue down the route hole yeah so i i think yeah there's there's a lot of different facets to uh my uh kind of entry into crypto web 3 blockchain uh originally i was looking at the potential of local currencies and that

kind of ties into the shopcity.com model and looking at you know how that could be executed uh so uh started you know researching blockchain and bitcoin uh back uh you know 2011 2012 2013 uh we enabled uh through shop city merchants to uh you know get paid through bitcoin and so that was uh kind of the the first foray into crypto uh but uh you know it didn't really kind of click there wasn't a lot of adoption at the time and uh i wasn't really coming at it from a speculative purpose it was more about the practical technology how could we utilize these payment networks and then in uh 2011

i ended up having this encounter with with google that just really opened my eyes to how much market power they had and how they could basically make or break any venture on the internet and uh how there was just a real you know huge ton of power that was concentrated within this entity that really there was no transparency there was no community uh interfacing there was there was really kind of the the antithesis of the internet as far as i'm concerned uh and so i came up with a concept for pre-search in uh 2013 uh 2014 uh that we kind of thought of as the switzerland of search that was really what we're thinking of which is great

considering you're in switzerland right now uh that's right yeah if you go back to the original version of it uh on archive.org that was the the the tagline and just thought you know that there could be more of an open playing field for search and that there could basically be this uh interface where it could be like a federated search field and and lots of different search engines could plug into it and it could kind of live above the search uh layer uh but didn't really have a a go to market strategy for it uh previous to that i had started uh this start page builder called startster.com that i ended up uh you know shutting down because google came up with igoogle in 2007 2008 and i got scared and i thought oh you know

it's no way we're going to be able to compete against google kind of had this series of events uh that have built the confidence that actually we can challenge google uh in time but uh anyways uh fast forward to 2017 uh my friend matt really really sharp guy he got me into into ethereum we brought him in he did kind of a workshop with you know our programmers and a bunch of people at shopcity.com to to educate us on the opportunities we looked at you know would it apply to shop city uh spoke with uh uh you know our legal advisor addison who was the the founding lawyer for ethereum actually he's out of

toronto you guys may know him addison cameron huff really sharp guy and he said you know kind of a gray area a little bit risky right now you've got already uh existing customers and investors and employees i don't know if it's such a great idea to try to you know integrate integrated into your business model so but okay well we don't really want to uh uh just sit on this this opportunity this seems like a great way to build community and to to bootstrap uh something and so thought well what about what about pre-search and realize that uh this was now a go-to-market strategy that that would just uh fit perfectly so i came up with how everything would integrate and the

tokenomics was really kind of fairly straightforward and then ran with it so you're uh you're a real og in this space i didn't realize that you were in it for that long and i think um pre-search sounds like just an unbelievable model and i'm excited to dive into that but first we're gonna lay some groundwork and just talk about kind of um the the foundation of seo and sort of what's happening right now and why we think web3 could be a solution for this um first can you just walk us through a little bit more of your story of what happened with your previous business in google um i've heard the story a little bit before and it's quite interesting and i think it sets us up for why we need some decentralization in this in this space so if you want to dive into

that that'd be that'd be awesome yeah so so shop city it's it's kind of like a a platform basically we registered all these domain names like more than 20 years ago so shop new york.com shopboston.com shopsf.com shopjustabouteverywhere.com and and built out this model where people uh locally could license uh the platform get access to the domain name and then go out and build kind of this local business network and a marketplace platform and uh so so uh one of my business partners jim he's in uh silicon valley area i grew up in san jose we ended up connecting with a guy who went out and did business development in mountain view right where google's based and uh one of his first orders of

business of course is joining the mountain view chamber of commerce and uh so as he does that he realizes oh they're running a shop mountain view campaign we have shopmountainview.com which was uh you know a site that we thought oh that would probably resonate there so we we spun that up uh through that partnership with the chamber somebody from the newspaper came to write about it the publisher of the paper said hey we're running a shop mountain view campaign could we license it and become what we call a city manager so we thought okay that sounds sounds great they've got all the relationships they ended up bringing in the city of mountain view who was also running a shop mountain view campaign and so we started marketing shopmountainview.com palo alto dot com shopmanlowpark.com in silicon valley uh

of course google is a member of their home chamber of commerce as well so this is certainly kind of within their uh you know purview and and radar uh next thing we know they're starting this thing called the get your city online campaign partnering with chambers of commerce we're like oh that's weird and then we wake up in the the middle of july in 2011 and and almost all of our sites are on page eight of google so you could search for shopmountainview.com by name it would be on page eight so we're like oh what the heck this is weird what did we do we start looking into it trying to figure out you know from an seo standpoint hey did we uh have an issue with our robots.txt did we do whatever too much interlinking any of

these different things so kind of start walking through it we're getting all this community feedback for participating in all these seo forums in the meantime we're trying to get somebody from google to give us some type of guidance and it's just not uh forthcoming everybody's saying yeah i don't know it looks kind of fun we can't really see any issues uh so we we ended up you know after like our sites basically and our traffic getting nuked for for you know a couple of weeks uh start getting desperate and it's like well what are we gonna do if we can't get this resolved this whole business model is gonna die and we've got millions of dollars invested into it uh and nobody can find it on google so i ended up seeing an article from a lawyer called gary ryback he was the guy

who broke up microsoft with windows and internet explorer back in 99 2000 he was uh running an investigation in with the ftc and uh i thought you know what i'm just going to email this guy and just see if there's next thing i know i'm in menlo park talking to gary and he's going wow this is amazing you've got a great story this is like a control group because not all of your sites so if they say it's a quality issue you can prove it's not that if they say it's you know a content issue or a platform issue it's not that uh next thing i know my phone starts ringing and we end up with this uh front page article on the business section of the san jose mercury news and in it google

admitted for the first time that they had assessed a manual penalty uh previous to that all their communication was it's all algorithmic and oh yes there might be uh some change in the the algorithm and that's why you've been demoted no in this point they they admitted and then consequently built out within uh the the google uh uh webmaster tools uh a manual penalty uh resolution uh system uh but anyways gary was able to basically help us through the press put enough pressure on google to to get our issue resolved but really realized just how much market power they had had seen uh in the course of uh you know the course of doing our

research and communicating with people in these forums that like thousands of others had basically been nuked by google and had to shut down or lay everybody off and just thought man this isn't right there needs to be something that's more community driven we need some type of you know search is a utility it's the gateway in the the access point for all the information on the web and yet we have this one corporate entity that is basically you know at their own kind of will oh we're going to spin up a competitor we're going to squash everybody in the space we're going to you know make this change now it's a you know majorly about censorship and kind of bias and agenda but

uh it's it's you know we need something that is more accountable to the community something that has a different foundation it's not just about profit and uh and so you know started thinking about how that could happen and how we could leverage big tech basically to defeat big tech and so that was kind of the the original uh you know ui for for pre-search it was an interface into google you would search google but you would have this really kind of thin uh uh kind of wedge into that user behavior okay set up a different you know search page at least where now you could have a search field and now you could have all these different icons below the search field where you could

now search all these different resources and for me that was really actually the the biggest value because i i don't know probably a lot of the creators and and people that are watching uh you know you have different uh platforms that you're searching it could be a crm system it could be a content management system it could be a database i was always doing lots of domain name lookups and uh you know my current or my previous workflow was going in i would either have to bookmark all those sites or i would have to google them pull them up wait for the page to load find the search field put my search in in this case i can add in all these different providers and then just direct my query into that that resource and it saves me time and i

thought you know that's one way that we could make things more efficient than google and it would be potentially a go to market strategy and so that was the first uh prototype uh but but again kind of didn't really see like how are we gonna bring this out to millions of people without like going down the the regular path oh we're gonna go raise venture capital now we're gonna be in that same paradigm that big tech is in and we're gonna get pulled into the profit narrative and you know the wall street exit and all that kind of stuff and so it just didn't really pursue it but uh yeah that's that's kind of the backstory it's a absolutely crazy story and i mean i think we're starting to hear a lot more of these happening right it's not just

google either like in the commerce world you have amazon who does this right they just rug anyone who has a good you know product or whatever and they just they make their own for way cheaper um i think this is one of the big reasons why web3 um you know is is gaining so much adoption and so much traction is because hopefully building things in the blockchain and decentralizing is going to to solve this let me give a quick breakdown for people if they don't really understand search engine or seo um i just want to lay the foundation a little bit here um google i don't know how many people use google versus the others but i think it's like it's got to be like 90 or something at least 50 yeah 92 so you think of that there's billions of users and i mean first of all the search

engine that google created is an amazing thing it has made the internet so much easier for all of us right like without if you remember the internet without search engine like what a terrible time that was so like we have to a little bit be grateful for what they've done um but the power that they've kind of gained as a result of this is unbelievable because you got to think of the first page of google almost like i don't know running a business in the middle of manhattan or the middle of you know london or wherever any of the big cities where all the traffic is and where everyone's going it's like if you run a business there a storefront that's the same as like having your business or your website in this case on the first page of google like if you're not on the

first page of google i forget maybe you know the status you probably do how many people actually make it to the second page of google it's like a very versatile two percent two percent that's insane so like that real estate is insanely insanely valuable to be on the first page of google and the problem is is that they can control who goes on there and there's really nothing we can do about it um although i guess did you did you actually get them to change like when you put all that pressure on them did it get turned around we we did it it took over a month and so you know all these poor businesses like in our hometown of midland ontario like every business had had their web presence gone for over a month it was it

was honestly it was horrible but yeah we did get it resolved unbelievable so let's talk about how i mean i think we can all understand and grasp the problem here and the problem is the amount of power that they hold uh and that they can just kind of you know click a button and boom you can be moved off for whatever reason whether it's censorship resistance i mean sorry censoring someone for something uh or blocking competition or whatever um give us the sort of like idea of how does web3 fix this what what is a i mean if it's the blockchain or if it's like what sort of incentives or how do we how do we fix this problem um because going up against google is obviously not easy uh and can decentralizing what the algorithm or like how do we even fix

this via web3 yeah so so i think there's kind of numerous facets to to how web 3 can enable a massive uh challenge like this to to actually be uh you know successfully mounted and uh so so the first one is that that you know uh kind of capital formation and and the the foundational entity uh and and kind of the loyalties uh that are are set up at the genesis of something and so you know google they they were research students uh they realized that if they were gonna scale this they would need tens or hundreds of millions of dollars uh they were in silicon valley

so they ended up getting you know venture capital will the venture capitalists have investment uh partners limited partners uh they all have an expectation of a financial return and so they need from their investment some sort of exit that would be either selling to somebody else or it would be going public and so google did end up going public they tried to do kind of the most you know egalitarian uh dutch auction method for for you know putting their shares out to the public but it's still you know you've got to be uh and like i don't know if you guys own shares in google like i i don't um

i don't know too many people truthfully that do but i know just about everybody who uses google and so yeah you've got you know this opportunity but it's it's not really aligned with the actual user base and uh so with pre-search uh you know there's there's no venture capitalists there's there's no investors it's basically community crowd funded uh very similar to like a a kickstarter project uh and we have this this token the pre-token that is this unit of value that we basically have committed this is going to be the unit of value this is going to be uh the the central focus for how value is uh you know driven demand is driven on the advertising side

it's going to be how value is shared out to the the user side and we're going to maintain alignment with all the participants of the ecosystem whether they are people who bought tokens in our our you know original crowd sale uh which are set up as basically prepaid advertising credits or the people who are going to search and be rewarded as they're searching uh it's kind of the incentive for them to shift away from google or those who are marketers and are going to go out and help us build the user base and so we've got a referral program they earn pre-search tokens and so we've basically preserved alignment with all the different stakeholders of the ecosystem around this one unit of value colin i understand the the ownership and

the incentivization and the financial side of it i think that's an obviously a huge impact or a huge unlock of web three so when it comes to like the business that to me makes complete sense i'm curious on the product itself like when you're talking seo the reason google is so big is because it works so well their algorithm is so good they have um they're able to you know basically parse it across the entire internet and get every single website and we can do it all in like a second right and that's really their modes it's just how good their algorithm is and like how relevant the searches are that we actually you know when we're searching we actually get the right stuff i think that's why it beat out a lot of its competitors early on because they focused on simplicity and just like that

algorithm does that change with whether it's pre-search or others that are doing this i mean more just when seo gets out of the hands of google or maybe google has to disrupt themselves but like does the algorithm also have to change is there a more fair distributed way of how the algorithm works or who controls the algorithm um so outside of the business side how is there anything in terms of the product itself that changes with web3 yeah absolutely and and so um you know where presearch is at right now and then what our vision is those are two different things so uh you know what we're doing uh right now largely leveraging external indexes databases apis and and kind of combining that

within something like a meta search or or an aggregator type uh system but over time the goal is to build a fully decentralized index and so uh you know one of the the core differences i mean there's a lot of of computing power that's required to to utilize a and build out a search engine i mean google has massive scale so their their needs are you know much greater than a startup like pre-search but they've got something like 20 massive you know multi-hundred million or billion dollar data centers all over the world and and everything is highly controlled highly centralized in our case basically we don't again we're not going to go raise venture capital uh assert ourselves into

a jurisdiction with all these physical real estate pieces and data centers so well how do we leverage existing computing resources that are out there on the network well we can enable people to have things like a pre-search node which this is a raspberry pi based device people can run it on their home internet connection or on a business internet connection or they can install the pre-search node software on their own computer or on virtual private servers and they can contribute computing resources into the network in exchange for pre-search tokens so that then enables us to incentivize that layer of infrastructure to basically kind of self assemble and and manage uh

the needs of the the network without us centrally having to have you know database administrators and and you know centralized server uh you know admins and and people that are running all this different hardware all over the world we we've got you know a small team that's running kind of that core right now top layer of the the network that what we call uh node gateways which basically all the different nodes connect to but the the vision is to decentralize those as well so that ultimately we can have a core team that is contributing software through you know a git github or you know a process where community members can participate uh ultimately

and uh you know just like bitcoin essentially have this software that that people can run all over the place and connect into the network and provide uh the infrastructure needs of the network uh that is kind of the core and what we we've just released we released uh our our main net at the end of may and uh we now have 73 000 user nodes that are powering uh the competing resources for for pre-surge basically what i think we've learned so far is that um what we're trying to do here is one you're decentralizing the business model or the business of search right and that's by taking the the business of google let's say but in this means we're doing it through tokenomics where it's shared and

the governance ownership is shared you're also decentralizing the infrastructure of search so the data storage which i think is really key for scaling and also removes like the risk of well what if someone went and blew up google's data centers then it's just screwed whereas if it's decentralized you're all good and then before we get into pre-search and learning more about all the things you guys are doing the other layer of search i find is the algorithm this is the thing that you said was the biggest cause that resulted in your business basically being screwed for like a month um are we decentralizing the algorithm as well or how does the algo like who owns that algorithm and how do we how do we know how that algorithm works like google keeps it private and they

can control that algorithm they can change it whenever they want does that also get changed here or what's what are you guys doing with that because that seems to me like the third area of search that we haven't discussed yet yeah so so ultimately yeah it it you know will involve a a protocol and and for uh the actual uh blockchain based index uh which would be something that that yes could be uh harnessed for for many different purposes by many different search engines and uh you know the value of that could be driven into the system in in different ways you know whether it's api access or uh you know different there there's

there's something called common crawl right now that is uh like you know an open uh web crawl it's it's a kind of a you know base uh uh you know data set that anybody can utilize it's it's you know free it's open source so it's it's something similar to that and common crawl is pretty good it's not google quality though uh and and so uh you know then you've got that that data set but then you've got uh you know there's there isn't really just one algorithm it could be like okay hey this is a local query this has you know a local algorithm that's that's attached to it oh this has uh an algorithm that is uh

you know associated with uh some niche topic it could be uh you know something that identifies hey that the query is commerce related this has a a shopping algorithm and a shopping ui and and so if you look at google as you start you know doing queries or or you know you're starting to see the the early versions of that on on pre-search um like if you go into presearch.com right now and you type in bitcoin you'll see the community package for for crypto information and so that basically uh identifies you know based on on that that query term we can basically say hey is this part of the uh crypto

information set does does does this require that view and and that algorithm and and uh you know we're basically pulling from like the coin market cap api to see okay is that term a crypto pack a crypto project term is it a ticker symbol for a crypto project if it is then it's a crypto query okay then display the crypto community package which then gives you you know a uh a chart and some information on on you know that specific crypto uh project and and you know it's powered currently by the coin market cap api

so uh right now that's the default community package but we have the ability for you guys could go in and build or somebody watching this the show could go in and build a crypto information package they could determine what the ui looks like they could say oh i don't like you know coin market cap i'm going to make it run on uh coingecko well then we have the ability to display a ui where the user can go in and like toggle through well what are the different community packages oh okay i like the one that j built better i'm gonna make that my default and so it's it's ultimately you know pre-search will be like the set of default defaults uh by default but ultimately

we're enabling people to set their own defaults and and we're building something out called uh community search engines which would enable somebody let's say you know you guys are influencers in the web 3 space you want to have your own pre-configured version of pre-search that has all your different defaults that you think are valuable for your audience you could then go out and start sharing the link for that community search engine they would then by default adopt your defaults and then you could earn some of the pre-search tokens that they earn as searchers because you were the one who introduced them into the platform and so it's it's you know ultimately like

there's kind of multiple layers to it community search engines is like kind of the turnkey ui and ability to interact with what will ultimately be the protocol but underlying that ultimately will be a protocol that people that have competing platforms will be able to utilize so it won't be just pre-search there will be you know the pre-search uh data set and and you know the the pre-search uh kind of core information that's available out to other people who want to build their own search engines uh and and that's really ultimately where it's going in time it sounds like we need to rethink so for the listeners um we're sort of rethinking how we do search right um

because you're basically talking about creating different um uis or uxes for search right like you can either start searching and do it with someone that you follow like almost like a social concept to search kind of thing um which is quite interesting so it's very different than like everyone has one interface which is google and we all search the same way what you're saying is what decentring all decentralized decentralizing everything does and sort of the the things that you're enabling allows you to start searching within communities uh or following communities to search which i think is just something very different than most people are probably um probably used to from a user standpoint so i get all the

like opportunities there for let's say agencies and businesses and whoever else that wants to start to build those kind of things from a user perspective why is this better for me than google like other than the fact that you can earn tokens okay but let's put that aside because i don't think that's a sustainable solution to anything but from a user standpoint is this something that is better now for users to search like google's pretty good google accomplishes everything i need like why do i need all these additional things what does that unlock for me i'm just curious yeah so i i think like the early user base uh for pre-search is is honestly people who don't like google and they don't uh want to support google and uh

they're looking for an alternative and so uh that's that's really you know the the earliest adopters and so uh in in this case we need to be uh a reasonable facsimile for google and if we can be that then you know people will will shift uh over over to pre-search and that's really what's what's happened so far uh but ultimately uh i mean for me like you know i haven't used google in a long time uh the the results on pre-search are google quality uh so so uh i mean you can go and and pre-search just about anything and you'll get pretty much uh you know as good of results as you would get on google

uh in some cases if you're let's say a crypto user or if you're somebody who's doing you know uh currency exchanges uh you know as part of your workflow uh pre-search is actually better we've got a a currency converter that is you know much more robust than what is is in google uh the crypto information package again much more robust that's uh within google and we see ultimately those community packages and those on-page results those knowledge panels which you know like you said uh you know page two of google is yeah uh there's not a lot of action there right uh the knowledge panels uh on google are actually where the action

really is uh and that's why they've brought them on page and so uh presearch ultimately has the ability to have you know thousands or tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people out there independently building these knowledge packages for all different niches and different topics that google might not even know or identify as being an opportunity or something that would deserve its own knowledge panel something that we centrally as a project team could never identify their people come up with stuff we're like oh wow we had no idea that was such a huge niche and all these people are really passionate about this one thing had no idea never heard of it well you have the ability now through community package packages to go out and build that on

page experience and you can make it uh you know quite customizable and and and quite valuable and so like that's a way that that pre-search can get better than google from a results standpoint i mean google hasn't changed a whole lot over the past 20 years if you look at it from a ui standpoint aside from these knowledge panels that they have basically been adding to keep people more on the google search experience and not going out onto external websites uh the the only other thing that's really changed is they used to have one ad then two then three then four now like if you go to a commercial query there's five ads before the organic results come up so like there's a huge

opportunity right now to disrupt google and to to provide a better user experience and you know why they haven't changed much over the past 20 years is because they found out pretty early on the best way to monetize they didn't really necessarily just find the best way to drive search results there's been very little innovation over the past 20 years what they have done is figure out how to how to bring in over 100 dollars a year with these simple text ads that are relatively unchanged from like 2005.

so that is the google secret sauce that's very true so it sounds like pre-search is essentially an aggregator of all the different search uh search platforms which are on the internet like it could be your commerce like amazon it could be your block explorer like etherscan it could be your your website explorer like google it's kind of all those and it's one intuitive way to sort of click around and get them all on one page which is actually super cool i'm curious of then what is the business model because we've talked about you know you talked about if you run a node which is allowing you to decentralize the infrastructure you can earn tokens cool you can search you can earn tokens cool one thing we know from web3 though is anytime you're inflating a currency and just consistently giving out tokens it's eventually going to go

to zero right we saw it with axiomfinity uh we saw it with step in from um which is on solana i mean there's so many that have done this so i i assume you guys have a model that um either brings those tokens back into like out of circulation uh or it burns them or something so that we're not just always inflating can you sort of talk about the tokenomic structure because it's actually quite interesting uh the way that pre-search is doing it yeah so so it's a fixed supply so that's that's one of the the core differences uh you know there's a fixed supply of pre-search tokens and uh basically the the demand driver is the advertising platform again to you know that 100 billion dollar opportunity and and like

the economic value in search is tremendous it is literally the most valuable marketing opportunity that exists in a scalable self-serve way uh you know there's something called transactional intent somebody as they're searching they have indicated the intent for a transaction that they intend to complete and it from a marketing standpoint is like that moment in time where you want to get in front of somebody hey i'm looking for something it's like man what's a better more qualified opportunity somebody's walking down the street hey does somebody know where a restaurant is hey if you've got somebody standing out in front of your restaurant yeah once you come in here like you're going to convert those people and and they have indicated what their intent is

and you know google has taken it to this whole other level where they are building profiles and and basically predicting which is creepy like what you're actually you know wanting and they're enabling marketers to target you based on intent that you may not have even expressed yet so that's like a whole other level but you don't need to do that honestly the the most profitable business model before google was the yellow pages and the yellow pages is the original what they call directional media you indicate that you have a need and you're going literally to a resource to say hey who can fill my need well any of the people that get listed in that that list of options they're going to

convert really well they're going to you know get a lot of value from being included in that list and so you know we're basically taking that huge massive opportunity and we're now bringing it into this pre-denominated advertising system so we we built something that uses what we call keyword staking we haven't turned on the consumptive charge for it yet which is like the cost per click as somebody uh you know clicks on the ad which is what then brings pre back into the ecosystem but to start as far as creating demand goes we enable people to basically stake their pre against whichever term they want to have their

ad displayed under and so we're moving to more of a kind of a hybrid model where there will be like two different components one will be how much you stake and the other will be how much you are willing to pay on a cost per click basis and then that will determine you know kind of that that mix of exposure that your ad gets because if there's multiple ads uh which you know in google uh there's there's heavy competition and and you know because again it converts so well uh you know where pre-search is right now we've got four million registered users there's about a million active users we're doing you know a couple million queries a day uh as that gets to like you know 10 million queries a day which is kind of the next goal then it becomes a lot you know right now

it's really relevant for crypto projects it's really relevant for uh you know web 3 projects because that's our audience our audience is like almost exclusively you know crypto enthusiasts and and so you know that's really like you know the term bitcoin right now is something like 6 million pre-staked on it it's it's crazy uh but you know sorry sorry calling let's just slow down for a sec i'm trying to understand how you're using staking and how that applies to advertisers can you just can you explain this as if you're explaining it to your mom absolutely so if if you go on to uh keywords.presearch.com you can see there's there's like a

there's an advertise button then you can see there's a search field and so you can type in let's say you had an ad for shoes and you wanted uh every time somebody searches for the word shoes you wanted your ad to be displayed you can go into this system you can type in the word shoes you can see what the maximum uh stake is which is where somebody again they still own the tokens they can cancel their ad at any time and get the tokens back they can do whatever they want with the tokens sell them or use them on a different ad but they are committing them to that term and they're basically saying you know i give this much economic value to having my ad be displayed when somebody searches for that term and then

if they have the most it's currently a winner take all model and it's just based on staking uh they can then go in put in just like they can on google a title for an ad a description and then a link and so then somebody goes in they search for shoes they see oh who's staking the most tokens oh this guy pulled their ad up their ad says this when somebody clicks on that link goes out to their external website currently there's actually no charge on that so they're basically getting free traffic as people are clicking on it which is you know something that doesn't exist really anywhere else because we're basically focused on you know building the demand and kind of getting all those different mechanisms sorted out building

that audience making it more relevant and then when we get to a point which is going to happen later this year because we're already pretty much there where there is you know demonstrated economic value people who are getting you know like dollars into a business model every time somebody clicks on their ad well a portion of that value will then start flowing back into the ecosystem in the the cost per click model and so so that's basically how how it works currently uh essentially like an auction based kind of thing where you you put up the value that you want and so long as you're the highest you're going to rank the highest and then someone can easily come in and just stake more of the pre-search token whatever that is

and now they take over and it's sort of like just keeps going up and up and up which so that is your so when it comes to tokens it's all about buy and sell pressure right if you're just giving away tokens then those people are selling it because they're earning right they want to sell that into whatever their local currency is but to balance that you need either hold pressure or you need buy pressure and essentially the model here is that for advertisers if you want to use this platform you have to buy the tokens number one and then you have to commit to staking those tokens for as long as you want to use the the ad essentially and so that creates by pressure it also creates holding pressure which is quite nice people aren't selling the tokens all the time um and so that's how you

can kind of balance the uh the ecosystem or the the value of the token itself i guess is there potential for additional ways to have whether it's advertisers or users or something to want to hold or buy these tokens or is there any other plans around the token itself yeah yeah so a couple of the other things i mean so so having that consumptive uh you know click revenue coming in that's a way to replenish the ecosystem with pre but you know we've got some other methods we haven't rolled out yet but uh nft based where you're going to be able to basically secure you know secondary or tertiary

uh space within the ui so whether you know it'll be different if it's on mobile or if it's on desktop but let's say you're on desktop down the right-hand side uh of of the page there's a lot of real estate well we could have an nft that corresponds to an ad position that corresponds to a language a region a search term and basically we can sell those nfts for pre to bring pre back into the ecosystem and then enable whoever is the holder of that nft to uh and this really i think would work great from a an agency standpoint giving them the ability to go out and resell that uh ad space at whatever they think

they can sell it for again denominated in pre so it's a way for them to uh you know have have that bit of of of loyalty and this you know again coming from more of the local search space and kind of you know directories and and like google basically used all the yellow pages companies that had all the the relationships with all the the local businesses to bring them all into the google my business ecosystem and then they basically cut out the agencies because i don't need them anymore we've got the relationships now and that just doesn't sit right with me honestly being on the other side of it and so hey what is a way that we could enable people who are those agencies and are those stakeholders uh to actually have

more of like an ownership element within the platform how much more incentivized will they be if they know oh that won't be taken away from me right they know that this is an asset and we can introduce something like heartburger taxes that are are kind of a method for ensuring that you know that space doesn't go to waste and and whatnot uh but it it's still what it does is it gives people uh that value so there's there's that model uh which uh i think is really interesting but then ultimately uh you know the rewards side of things uh to searchers to to infrastructure providers uh it might not be denominated in pre that's another marketing opportunity honestly we can

partner up with newer crypto projects that are uh you know rich in their tokens but maybe they don't have you know a ton of bitcoin or ether or other things you know the ability to exchange into pre uh we could enable them to distribute their token through our system which has a really extensive anti-abuse system so they could come in and basically take over let's say rewards for the week and they would get exposure all throughout the pre-search ecosystem and then the rewards instead of coming out in pre they come out in the native token of whatever that project is and then as a searcher you're basically building a wallet of not just free tokens but tokens from all these other projects that are coming in and incentivizing

people so uh you know those are some of the ways ultimately we see it going it's interesting the two questions that i get asked the most that i feel like the two takeaways i'm getting from this podcast is is seo going to die uh with web3 i think the answer is no it actually opens up so much more opportunity when you open up the protocol or you turn it into a protocol rather than a product and you open source it you have apis and you allow others to build on top of it you can actually do things that are not possible in search today so i think the answer is seo going to die and web 3 the answer is absolutely not um though it sounds a little bit complicated it's probably going to get even better and more accurate the other question is yeah the other

question i always get is um is advertising gonna die in web3 and i think the answer to this is absolutely not um advertising is very useful um the difference here is it's about to become an open marketplace right so right now advertising in web 2 means you just abide by the rules of google and whatever google wants to charge you you have to pay that and it doesn't matter what they say or what they do you just have to do it same with facebook everything else and what this what's happening here is it's like web 3 is turning this or pre-search but i'm sure this is going to apply to social platforms to everything else is like it's becoming an open marketplace for advertising and it's like well let the markets decide what the cost should be for displays in and you can get very specific is what

you're saying it's like what's going to be the cost to put on the first page of this term in this country for these type of users that you can go so specific with it and i think that is really really cool and a big unlock is that we sort of open up the the code and we open up the utility of the potential of search but we also open up the marketplace on the advertising side um so those are my big big takeaways which is very very interesting we're getting close uh to ending up on time here um so jay i don't know if you have any additional questions if not we do a speed round which i think we're going to jump into as well but jay if you have any additional questions feel free to yes one i just want to ask one question

about so if if i have to stake in order to if state pre-search tokens in order to rank for a keyword from an advertiser's perspective what what happens to small businesses who don't have the resources or the budget to be able to acquire the necessary pre-search tokens to stake so so that that's why we're moving to this kind of hybrid model where you know it'll be more of a mix of what you're willing to pay on a cpc basis plus what you're you know able to stake but we we actually have uh one of our community members actually just last week uh opened up a a pre-lending

uh uh model so they have a bunch of research tokens they're now starting to basically you know lease those out uh to people who want to be able to use the current model which is winner take all and so they can basically pay in whatever other currency or however they decide to uh you know accept value and and enable people to use their pre and so i i think you know there's there's definitely ways that it could be done uh you know we're definitely i would say more aligned to you know the the the little guy and you know the underdog that's kind of our background and so definitely trying to ensure that this isn't something where it just becomes dominated by you know those who are

uh the wealthiest i mean that's how it is in web 2 anyway right like that's in google if you i could own any keyword i want if i have unlimited amount of money so it's like it's not that this open marketplace is making that worse if anything like you said it makes because it's open we can create different iterations and things like loans and things like that to like make it more innovative and find ways to help but ultimately like money does matter in these instances so i'm not sure that web 3 ever really fixes that what well like but isn't that a cool example like what a great uh example of what community does in website right i love that story and and so i i think what you you mentioned yeah like seo

doesn't go away advertising doesn't be like if if anything advertising becomes better because your incentives are aligned so as a searcher and as people kind of get more into the ecosystem they realize oh that person who put up pre in order to have their ad here is actually some it's it's a sponsor that's somebody that i should go support because they are conferring value on the tokens that i own it's not the same as if it's just extractive and it's just revenue based where you're not getting a piece of it and there ultimately may be a model where we could enable community members to basically allocate some of the pre that they are earning or or it could be you know again

that it's stapes so they don't lose anything but they might say hey yeah this is a great brand these guys have great values i'm going to take some of my power within the ecosystem and i'm going to confer it onto this sponsor so that their costs are lower and they can be uh exposed to more people within the ecosystem again it's it's about you know giving people all these tools to confer value and shift value and ultimately it could end up with you know a really just aligned community in so many different ways that's that's you know what i hope to see out of it absolutely all right let's uh let's start to wrap up and go to the speed round here colin uh okay so uh just gonna fire a few

questions at you um first what's one token could be nft or fungible that you'll never sell other than pre-search other than pre uh my good friend marco is uh the founder of a project called merit circle mc is the token uh got a a bunch of mc tokens they're they're basically building a platform for uh you know in-game assets that ultimately will you know largely be nft based uh but they're building a whole platform for uh you know different gaming guilds i i think you know out of all the trends

out there uh gaming is is probably i i i had no idea how big it is i mean honestly like i always talk about search is like the biggest opportunity google brings in and and i actually stand corrected it's gaming gaming is bigger than you know the music industry the movie industry the sports industry is put together it's like you know over 200 billion a year industry it's obscene and and uh it's a huge trend and uh at this point you know we've got all these really successful games uh that have their own in-game currencies and assets but they're they're not uh utilizing web three and i think that's probably the biggest opportunity that is is out there

uh from from a gaming standpoint and so what marco and his team are are doing is uh building out a platform to enable uh different games to uh you know do that and basically weaponry themselves and uh they've invested in tons and tons of he they brought in uh 106 million in uh their fair launch and uh they've invested in all the leading uh blockchain uh uh game platforms that are out there and uh i think mc is it's a it's a huge hold other than that bitcoin okay final question uh if you had a billboard which one billion people were

going to see what would you write on that billboard oh and it can never change uh no one's ever there's no rules here it's it's you know it's composable but you can only give one answer right right now well i it would have to be you know presearch.com something i i'd have to make it you know wow yeah open it up to the community what does the community think needs to be that tagline but it needs to have preschool.com on it awesome all right colin thank you so much for the time this has been a pleasure really enjoyed learning about pre-search and uh

all your beliefs around decentralization and you know really the importance of aligning incentives in the space i think we all really believe in that and uh thanks for all the work you do i wish you we wish you all the best and learn more about pre-search where do we uh where do we go i mean obviously presearch.com uh we can see that on the billboard but uh anything else twitter or anything else or um yeah where do we find you guys yeah twitter.com presearchnews telegram t dot me slash research discord.research.com those are kind of the best places perfect okay well thank you so much that was great and uh so good to finally have those questions answered that i consistently get asked like on a weekly

date or probably a daily basis so uh colin thanks so much and uh all the best in ontario where jay and i are from but are not there right now thank you for listening to web3 academy we hope this helps you along your web3 journey if it does please share this episode and subscribe so you don't miss the next one by the way if you have yet to join the discord community you are missing out this is where all the magic happens this is where we learn where we ask questions where we network uh you want to be in there the link to join is in the description below and finally a quick disclaimer nothing in this podcast was financial advice crypto and web 3 can be risky you can literally lose it all in fact if you invest on account of what we say you probably will lose it

all so don't do that in all honesty the point of this podcast is to remove the noise of markets and price and focus on utility and implementation anyway so you should not take any of this as financial advice thank you friends and see you in the next one