Today's FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) of the day is Presearch, a decentralized search engine.
From their mission statement:
We believe that the world deserves a community-driven, grassroots, decentralized search engine that’s built by and for the community it serves.
This search engine should reward those who contribute to its success, and leverage blockchain technology and cryptocurrency to align the interests of all of its stakeholders.
As alluded to in the mission statement, users are rewarded in their ERC-20 token, PRE, for using the search engine. Search nodes are rewarded for processing searches. Anyone can set up and run their own node, contributing to the greater decentralization effort. Advertisers stake PRE to have their ads displayed when users search specific keywords.
Is it Dead?
Out of curiosity today, I took a look at their token's (PRE) performance on CoinMarketCap. After scanning through some graphs and some FUD in the sidebar, it had me a bit worried. Zooming out to 1y, things start to look like that slow trickle downward reminiscent of a dying project:
Zooming out further tells a different story however. In fact, PRE is currently hovering around a value it spent just about 2 years steady on:
So what, though? Isn't that just a sign of stagnation? Maybe. Let's investigate.
Github
Presearch is an open source project, and as with most other open source projects, they have a Github account. Activity metrics on Github repositories can give a pretty solid indication of progress being made. I should note that this isn't always the case--projects may have both public and private repositories, and private repository activity may not be visible from the outside.
As far as recent activity, they have two repositories last updated yesterday, one last updated two days ago, and one last updated in November.
Hmm. Maybe we can explore what the actual people involved in the project are up to? The Github org page has a short list of people:
As it turns out, the guy on the left there is (or at least claims to be) their CTO. Seems pretty active:
Let's click on that most recent green square.
Oh, private repositories. That's boring. Clicking on a few more, I continued finding more private repo contributions until:
So as far as we know from what's publicly available, there's activity.
Telegram
Taking a quick peek at their Telegram announcement channel, there's a steady stream of news and feature updates. For instance:
Verdict
Is Presearch dead? I don't think so. Do I know for certain? Not really. But from this investigation, I'm pretty sure there's active development in progress. What do you think?
This article was first published on my LeoFinance blog.