ExtraMile by WisdomPlexus is an exclusive interview series featuring thought leaders and industry frontrunners. Here, we explore the latest trends and practices in the tech and marketing spectrums.
For today’s conversation, we are delighted to have Timothy Enneking, Chief Executive Officer of Presearch, with us. Presearch is a decentralized search engine that chiefly focuses on privacy and user experience. The firm utilizes blockchain to ensure privacy and empower users with a less biased search experience.
Timothy, as the CEO of Presearch, leads a dynamic team that sustains innovation within the firm. He took the organization to the next level of growth with relentless efforts and unmatched leadership qualities.
Discover how our guest, Timothy, is managing multiple positions alongside leading Presearch. Additionally, attain knowledge on Presearch’s approach to make search experiences decentralized and secure.
Welcome, Timothy; we’re glad to have you with us today!
1. You are managing multiple roles alongside being the CEO of Presearch. How do you ensure that each responsibility is fulfilled effectively?
Ans. Interestingly, my roles at Presearch, the hedge fund, and the VC fund are highly complementary. In fact, the hedge fund I manage is one of the largest Presearch node operators, while the VC fund is the project's biggest investor. So rather than competing for attention, these roles align and support each other. Presearch, along with its global community of node runners, operates a network of 40,000 nodes—making it one of the largest and most decentralized search engine networks in the world.
2. Presearch is establishing the world’s first decentralized web index for Web3. What possibilities can we expect from such an advancement?
Ans. True privacy is only possible through decentralization. With Presearch, one search might route through a node in New Zealand and the next through Germany. This structure makes tracking and profiling virtually impossible.
Even if a centralized search engine doesn’t sell your data, it still poses risks—your information can be hacked, exposed through regulatory mandates, or shared with law enforcement. Presearch avoids these pitfalls because we don’t collect personal data beyond an optional email address. This architecture delivers a level of privacy no other search engine can match, while still remaining compliant with necessary regulations.
3. Blockchain and decentralization are major breakthroughs in the technological field. How do these innovations assist businesses in various ways?
Ans. Historically, business has been built on overcoming a lack of trust (letters of credit, which have been around for 500 years, are the perfect example). The blockchain introduces trust into the equation. This allows massive disintermediation and much lower costs associated with transactions, administrative overhead, data storage, compute power and intermediary fees. The world is only beginning to wrap its arms around all of the possibilities…
The PRE token ecosystem complements our core business by aligning user, advertiser, and operator incentives in a way traditional models can't. Our PRE rewards incentivize node operators to secure the network while reducing operational overhead by distributing compute power across the community.
While our platform generates revenue through keyword staking, affiliate links, and ad units, the token layer introduces a decentralized incentive structure that fuels growth, drives engagement, and reduces reliance on centralized platforms—creating a self-reinforcing, symbiotic system where increased usage strengthens both the product and the token economy.
The beauty of digital assets lies in their ability to align incentives more equitably and help bootstrap a participatory economy—one where value is shared with the community, not extracted from it.
By open-sourcing our development (which is a crucial part of our decentralized web index build) we tap into a broader talent pool, subsidize engineering efforts, and deliver a vital utility: a safer, more private, and more efficient way to navigate the web—with more relevant results.
4. No technology comes without challenges. What are the major challenges and limitations of decentralized tech?
Ans. By far the biggest challenge is inertia: established ways of doing business, regulations which are based on that way of doing business, and the legacy infrastructure built up of decades, or even a century, to support both. It takes time to turn that aircraft carrier and people don’t like the fact that their business is being turned into making buggy whips
The biggest limitation is the quality of the information put on the blockchain. One might be able to trust information once it's on the blockchain, but that moves the trust issue to how that information is added, as well as how to identify the corresponding real-world item (if any). Think of the etiquette (label) of a bottle of wine on the blockchain. If the wine was faked (see Sour Grapes) before the bottle was put on the blockchain, we still have a problem. If the label is moved to another bottle, we still have a different problem.
Even if there is no real-world (physical) manifestation of the information on the blockchain, verification of the information before it is added to the blockchain is paramount.
5. Presearch is a community-driven decentralized search engine. How does it differ from other search engines, and how do ranking algorithms work here?
Ans. The key difference is privacy. Your searches are never tied to your identity. Thanks to our distributed node network, there’s no way to track you—even if we wanted to. This is a structural feature, not a policy we could change later.
All other search engines are fully centralized, which makes them vulnerable to data breaches, surveillance, and manipulation.
As we roll out our AI-powered, decentralized search engine, these advantages will only grow. Presearch offers a future-proof alternative that respects user autonomy and privacy from the ground up.
6. Privacy and security are the foremost considerations in today’s digital era. How do decentralized networks take care of user privacy?
Ans. As mentioned earlier, decentralization is foundational to privacy. With no central server storing user data, there's nothing to hack or misuse. Each search is routed anonymously through a global network of nodes, eliminating any meaningful traceability.
7. Presearch launched PreGPT Pro a month back. What features does the chatbot provide to streamline organizational workflow?
Ans. The biggest advantage of PreGPT Pro is that Presearch selects from the best AI systems available at any given time (which changes a lot), lowers (or removes) the guardrails of the search results to the absolute minimum, obtains highly advantageous pricing and passes all of that on to Presearch users at little or no cost. No one else has done all of that. It is important to understand that, by using open-sourced, uncensored models, we remove virtually all of the bias that is inherent in them.
8. You have been a tremendous leader over the years. How do you keep your team motivated and inspired to double their productivity?
Ans. Honestly, it’s simply a matter of execution, delegation, and holding people accountable. Since the early days of my career, I have emphasized those three points and, in almost every case, people rise to the challenge.
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