• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, May 13, 2025

When Presearch could not guarantee user privacy with known advertising units, the decentralized engine designed a takeover ad to give advertisers insights on impressions, clickthrough rates, device types, and geography.

Presearch Takeover Ads (PTAs), which launched in February, now offer advertisers a dashboard that details mobile and desktop — home pages and search pages — as well as device type, country of origin, total searches, registered and unregistered users.

There are links to preview where the ad served, for desktop and mobile. A map color-codes conversions, and areas that received impressions, but without conversions.

NordVPN and TradingView signed up as early test partners for the PTA and metrics dashboard.

Unlike traditional search engines that track and share user data, Presearch’s dashboard supports targeted advertising via its PTAs.

The startup has more than 400,00 daily searches, 13 million monthly impressions, and a growing crypto-native audience.

There is nothing typical about this search engine, from its ad units and data to its CEO Tim Enneking.

Enneking, a venture capitalist, spends most of his time working with Presearch, but also runs a company called Crypto Asset Fund, now referred to as CAF 2017, along with a management company, Digital Capital Management (DCM). DCM owns many Presearch tokens, and also runs many of the company’s nodes.

“The fund runs itself, basically, but there's a significant portion that depends on Presearch,” he said.

Another VC fund, Salion (“the P is silent, P-S-A-L-I-O-N, which is ancient Greek for chain) owns a little more than half of Presearch.

“All roads lead to Presearch in this case, and I'm the one who runs the place for my sins,” he said.

Presearch began using artificial intelligence (AI) in 2020, after launching in 2017.

“You do an AI search, you'll get AI results, but we still don't know your URL because that AI search goes through one of the 40,000 global nodes we have,” Enneking said. “We don't have any statistics about you. If you haven't registered, two-thirds of our users don't register, we don't even have your email address.”

He adds that unless someone enters their name, email address or phone number or something in their email address or their name, the company knows nothing about them.

The search company is built on community members who operate the nodes. They earn a few tokens a month to do this, but it is completely decentralized.

Presearch doesn’t know who operates the nodes until they have problems and report it to the company.

The searches are routed through the computers. Someone could be the first or 40,000 nodes after downloading a small piece of software on their computer.