Hammer Time! MC Hammer back! With...Search Engine!

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Former rap star MC Hammer says he is going to take on one of the biggest businesses in the world: Google.

Hammer, born Stanley Kirk Burrell, announced his new venture, to be called WireDoo, at O'Reilly Media's Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco on Oct. 19. The idea, he says, is a way to offer Web search “beyond just keywords.”

Hammer, in his presentation, said it wasn't "a competitive attempt to reinvent search" but a way to "make it better." If one were searching for homes, he said, one might be interested in the location and the local school system, as well as financing. He called it "relationship search" or "deep search."

While it certainly seems like an interesting idea, if reading this makes you skeptical that's understandable. Google has dominated the search engine business for a decade, and the ground is littered with competitors that eventually were bought or folded. (Think back to Lycos, or even Yahoo!).

Even Microsoft, which tried to build Bing into an alternative to Google, didn't manage to make much of a dent. Many sites that include search functions are powered by Google’s technology.


Such relational searching also isn't entirely new; some travel sites incorporate something like it when you plug in plane flights and it suggests hotels as well.

That said, if you want to try out WireDoo, you can do so here (you have to submit a name and email address). Hammer didn't say exactly when testing would be finished. Time will tell if WireDoo will be "Too Legit To Quit" or Google will be singing "U Can’t Touch This."

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