>> Announcer: From New York, it's The Cube! Covering Blockchain Week. Now here's John Furrier. >> Hello, everyone, welcome back. I'm John Furrier with The Cube. I'm your host here in New York City for Blockchain Week, Consensus 2018, as well. We're here with Colin Pape, founder of Presearch.org. It's got a search engine trying to replace Google, decentralized Google, decentralized search. Love this project, very ambitious. Colin, thanks for joining me. >> Great, thanks for having us, John. >> So I love the ambition of the project. Obviously love the search engine. But I've been ranting on The Cube. Everyone who knows me knows what I've been saying. Search is broken. >> Yeah. >> We still, Google's the only open search. At least they use, they're open. >> Facebook's closed. >> Yeah. >> Amazon's closed. >> Yeah. >> LinkedIn, Twitter, they're all closed platforms. >> Right, right. >> Plus the DNS needs to be modernized for the network effect. >> Right. >> It doesn't exist. >> Yes. >> So you can't actually have an effective search engine... >> ...in the new networks. >> That's right. >> The silos, yeah. >> There's no network search. You can't say, hey, what Colin said on The Cube, can you search that for me? Like, I like what he said, so give me some stuff. >> That's right. >> There's no keywords for that. >> Right, right. >> Search is dead, dying. >> Dying, yeah. >> You think, you agree? >> Yeah, there's been a lack of innovation. I mean, it's a service a lot of people don't recognize needs to be improved, but I think those who are really thinking about it from an innovative standpoint realize there's still a ton of upside, ton of opportunity, and some really original takes still to be had, so... >> What's your approach? In all seriousness, we love search, we love, we think it's got to change. You agree. Check, check. What's different? What do you, what's your approach? What's your strategy? How do you see it playing out? >> Sure, so we've got basically a short term and then a long term. So long term is actually building out a framework that different members of the community will be able to participate in. So teams of data scientists creating algorithms, feeding them into the system, getting traffic, testing if it's working, being able to share in the monetization, subject matter experts being able to assist with the curation of community content. And so that's kind of, you know, an actual search engine. Right now what we're doing is more of a search tool enabling different partners to come together to work against the search monopoly and to have their content discovered through the interfaces that they actually create with us providing an incentivization and a reward layer to get people to actually switch off of the Google search field. >> What I like about your idea, and I think why I like it so much is about the search, sites to search, 'cause I love search stories, is that open source has shown us a path. >> Yeah. >> Open source software has proven the model. >> That's right. >> Upstream projects worked by the community. >> Yeah. >> Downstream productization. You're essentially applying open source principles to solving the search problem by getting everyone in on the creation and then the ability to productize it on their own. >> That's right. >> Is that the way you're thinking about it? >> Yeah, very much. And that's really kind of what the framework will facilitate so that that reward and the sharing of the monetization, enabling people to have standards that they can build upon and have active personalization so people who are utilizing the engine will be able to specify, not just have everything kind of driven by their behavior, but what they want to see and who they actually want to support. >> So you saw our little video search engine. I gave you a demo of that. What'd you think? >> Amazing, amazing. That is really innovative, really exciting, and I'm hoping that that can be one of the options within Preserach to start. >> John: Yeah. >> And I think what you guys are doing with that is going to be phenomenal. >> Great. So how would we take that? So we have technology, you've got a collaborative mindset? >> Yes. >> Open door? >> Yes. >> Do I just go in and talk to you? Where do you live, Toronto? Where I'm living in Palo Alto? Is it a decentralized team? What's going on with your organization? How do you engage with people that want to work with you? >> Yeah, so we do have a decentralized team. We're kind of all over the world in various capacities. Main headquarters is in Toronto area, and then we have our tech team actually in Palo Alto, Rich Strenta, Greg Lindel, some guys that you probably know. >> Yup, I've interviewed them. Great guys. They know search. >> Definitely. So we're working with them on the technology side of things. But yeah, basically anybody can go to Presearch.org, sign up for an account, top right corner, there's a send feedback form. >> Did you raise any money, tokens money? >> We did, yeah, we did do a token sale last year, brought in 16 million. >> Sixteen. >> Yeah. >> Great, congratulations. >> Thank you. >> Security or utility token? >> Yeah, it's a utility or a consumptive token. >> And you do that out of Toronto or the US? >> We did it out of Toronto, yeah. >> Okay, cool. And can I get tokens now, or... How does it work? >> So we ended our token sale. You can earn tokens if you just go onto Presearch.org and start searching. So we're paying basically up to eight tokens per day for people to run their searches through us, and we are working on a model where advertisers, basically people who have the need for the token will be able to come into the platform again and buy 'em. >> Got it, cool. Great, awesome. Colin, what else is new? What else are you working on? What's next? >> What's next? Yeah, I think there's a lot of innovation obviously coming out of the blockchain space. We want to basically just collaborate with any of these different projects that really, I think there's a mindset in blockchain. People that are actually a little bit altruistic, they're trying to build a truly better world. The kind of capital structure of a lot of these projects is really unique. It's not just about the exit, which is fantastic. More of a long-term mindset. And so we're just looking for, yeah, anybody who's got a project that we can partner up with, create a more compelling offering than some of the centralized services. >> And where can they find information? Website, URL? >> Yeah, Presearch.org, P-R-E-S-E-A-R-C-H dot org. >> Awesome. Colin, thanks for joining me. Search engines are being disrupted. Everything's disrupted. Crypto, blockchain, token economics changes the nature of the people involved and also the data that can be used. This is the phenomenon called token economics. We're covering it here, Blockchain Week. I'm John Furrier. Stay with us for more coverage from New York City after this break. >> Aw- (sound cuts out) (musical sting)