STOP! Its Hammer time

Every week brings fresh news about what the search engines are up to, and even new contenders in the lucrative search market. But this week one piece of news resulted in more raised eyebrows than most – MC Hammer is launching his own search engine.

Yes that’s right, the rapper who rose to prominence in the late eighties and early nineties with memorable hits such as ‘U Can’t Touch This’, ‘Pump it Up’ and, erm, ‘U Can’t Touch This’, has launched a search engine. Currently in pre-beta phase, WireDoo has captured the attention of the mainstream media more than most search engine start-ups, if only because of the key protagonist responsible for its creation.

But besides the novelty factor of the news, and the obvious opportunities for sub-editors around the world to indulge their punny bones, WireDoo looks set to offer something different that both web users and webmasters may want to take a closer look at.

Can’t search this?

Speaking about WireDoo onstage at the Web 2.0 summit in San Francisco, MC Hammer (real name, Stanley Burrell) said that: “It’s not a competitive attempt to recreate search… but you can always make things better. There’s always a next version.”

So what will make WireDoo different? Hammer told the audience, which included Google’s co-founder Sergey Brin, that the search engine will focus on ‘deep search’, or ‘relational search’. Rather than simply returning the most relevant results to a user’s query it will also return related results to help the user further in their quest for information.

Hammer explained: “let’s say you were to enter the zip code 90210; you would get the basic information that would return from a normal query from [mainstream search engines], but then you would also see what we call related content. Under related content on that search it would say the schools, homes in that area, hospitals…It’d give you all this relative information.”

Although this may seem strange to anyone whose sole memories of Hammer consist of parachute pants and bad dancing, he has in fact been involved in the goings on of Silicon Valley for a number of years now, and is known as a technology entrepreneur.

Hammer says he expects WireDoo to launch properly in December, and sign-ups are currently underway for the beta version.