I’m glad the team now comes up with the “flexible” roadmap and request for community feedback. Hopefully, it’s a start for better listening to community feedback
As I like the add-ons to use the platform more broadly (Mobile App, Desktop browser) and “Whitelabel” expanding to other communities (Community Search Engine), let me start with the…
Presearch platform features for the regular user (not for the token holders/stakers)
Unlike the often-heard thought that the Presearch platform can “compete” with Google/Bing/DDG concerning features and benefits, I don’t agree. I think that Google outperforms Presearch on many features.
Below is a list of some Google features that Presearch is yet missing (in no particular order):
- Clean homepage with “I’m feeling lucky”.
- Better Language and Location settings.
- Number of results (at top of page), and time of page load.
- Advanced Search.
- People Also Ask (with feedback feature).
- Related Searches.
- Personalization settings (opt-in/out for personalized search and/or ad results).
- Block specific ads (and mark these as impropriate).
- More and better Filters (not just Maps, but also Books, Flights, Finance, Predictions, MarketCap, Chart, USD, and Price).
- Better News and Image results.
- Top Stories.
- Better Video descriptions with mentioning of duration, number of views, and date of posting.
- Highlight chosen keywords.
- About this Search result (source information, personalization, the first day of indexing, Learn more search tips).
- Incognito.
- Scrolling results. (Not limited to 10-13 searches per page and annoying forcing you to open next page).
Anyway, I can continue, but I fully disagree with the idea that the team can now stop developing new features as our product is ready to compete with the main search engines… Well, it’s not.
So, create a simple comparison table with all possible features/benefits comparing the main search engines, decide what features/benefits to add and when, and put these on the roadmap.
And as community members can come up with many other wanted features and benefits, set up a system for a “Feature Request & Feedback Board”. Just look at what Binance is doing with its Feedback Board and Public Feedback Roadmap.
This is an excellent system where the community can see the status of their proposals: Under review, Planned, In progress, Released.
Too often good feedback is ignored, or the admins try to answer and/or inform the management team, but there is no follow-up.
So, the current system is very inefficient and this can easily be solved. If the team doesn’t want to set up a new system, then use this Community… but as complained here often… this will only work if someone from the management team responds and informs us about the decision to include it in the to-do list or roadmap (with a short statement about the why).
This way, stakeholders will continue to come up with good feedback and proposals and will (feel to) be taken seriously.
BTW the reason I didn’t post here for several months is the lack of response by the management.
This Community was dead… and that’s for a reason.
The only reason I came back is that the team asked us to give feedback in this Community for the Keyword staking program, Roadmap, and USPs (including slogan).
So, it will be very interesting to see how the management team will respond this time to our feedback.
BTW, I’m not trying to convince you that Presearch should immediately implement all the missing features. But I hope you get the idea that the platform can be improved further.
So, this was about the search experience from the user perspective, what about…
Monetization experience
If we look at the roadmap for Q3 and Q4 2023, there were 5 Monetization roadmap items checked off.
- Coinzilla 2.0
- Homepage Takeover Ads.
- Affiliate Program integration.
- Presearch (Search) Takeover Ads.
- Bing Ads integration.
BTW, it’s very easy if you only completed 3 out of 14 roadmap items in Q4 2023 to move them in the future and add some other (minor) achievements as completed in that quarter.
But be honest, were these 5 all successfully being introduced without any further improvements still needed?
In short, Coinzilla 2.0 failed, the Affiliate Program integration with TradeAds (redirects) was a disaster, and the PTA is still a very annoying user experience, especially on smaller devices with annoying overlapping (over platform content and navigation) floating text and CTA-button boxes, and often accidentally and unwanted redirects to advertisers URLs.
And what about all those conflicting issues if users were using VPNs, Ad blockers, or were confronted with extra additional Captchas, or hidden content, and you can’t block annoying ads you don’t want to see anymore?
Let alone, that the full-page ads on the homepage are just too overwhelming for first-time visitors (you know you can only make your first impression once)… screaming “We want your money” and “We have sold our identity to advertisers”.
You can call these “Art Ads”, but the average user has another opinion… however, maybe there is hope as in the last AMA there was this text… “revised homepage that is more descriptive”.
For Bing Ads, I’m not sure what the current status is… I don’t see them anymore (only the first week), maybe it has to do with the country I’m living in (EU) and are Bing Ads only be allowed in the USA (and/or some other Tier1 English spoken countries).
Anyway, the monetization experience for the regular user was very poor in the last few months, resulting in many users leaving the platform.
So, I can’t classify this as being “completed”, and I can only hope that the team will spend more time to improve the monetization experience as we are still not growing in platform usages… but still chasing away users due to these bad monetization experiences.
I have switched back to Google for most of my searches… and I’m not the only one.
Concerning the (consumptive) keyword staking program, I gave my opinion in this Proposal answer in this Community…
(Keyword staking and consumptive model - #4 by Ben)
Personalization vs Privacy for Ads (and search results)
As Presearch respects “Privacy”, it doesn’t save your search results, doesn’t allow third-party cookies, and doesn’t save personal info or interests.
So, the platform can’t show targeted ads to its users (targeting based on known personal info and interests).
Earlier in this Community, I explained why Presearch shouldn’t be that stringent and should introduce "privacy levels”. This way it will still respect privacy but for those users who want to share more personal info and interests, we can give advertisers better targeting options who are willing to pay higher CPV or CPC.
The first step to more “personalization” has been implemented by targeting users based on their (known) location (IP address). I hope the team will include more “personalization” features for ads.
But also (in the future) personalization features for the search results. You know, everyone is biased to some extent. You have your preferences for gender, age, interests, sports teams, politics, religion, and war (country) support.
So, Google uses your preference to show you more “tailor-made” search results, without knowing anything about you, Presearch can only show “average” results… which can be annoying if it’s not what you are looking for as you are biased to some degree.
Hence, the “USP claim” that Presearch is giving better search results which was based on the additional “Community Packages” information is far behind the truth.
Most users will find the Google results better, not only because of all the additional features Presearch is missing but also because of the personalized results (which can be opt in/out for).
OK, so far my first comments. Depending on the replies, I will give my opinion later about the Tokenomics, Marketing, USPs (and slogan), and what else I have to say.
As it’s a flexible roadmap, let’s not discuss too many subjects at once.