Sunday, January 1, 2023

If Google Were Teal

How many Internet searches do you do in a typical day? During a busy session of teaching English online, I can rack up 100 queries, related to topics which my students have raised. One week I clocked in a whopping 360 searches, with terms ranging from "kiszona kapusta" to "Doctor Who time loops". They were all conducted on a single search engine (can you guess which one?)

We give an awful lot of personal data away just for the privilege of using their platforms. Don't get me wrong, I love Google -- they are generous with content creators. As a basic consumer the benefits are rather scant, however. Bing will reward you with points for choosing their machine, but they must be redeemed by shopping at the Microsoft Store. If you want to be paid in cold hard cash (well, in cryptocash at least!), Presearch is the only program out there. You can earn 0.1PRE per search, with a cap of 25 searches per day.

As of December 2022, that was worth US$0.81.


Of course, it is chump change but does add up, and it is better than earning nothing at all. More importantly, your PRE gives you voting and ownership rights and the ability to build a search engine that is for the people, by the people. A Teal organization, to be precise... (For more on the Presearch search engine and Ethereum token, click here.)