My-my-my-my search engine sucks hard
Makes me say, Oh my lord
Why can’t I find what I need
With a bit less clutter and a bit more speed?
It’d be good
When I surf the net
To find what I need and need what I get
Gotta click too much
And this ain’t a treat-uh!
You can’t search this
Come December 2011, web surfers might be singing a new song. They’ll have a new tool, a Hammer tool. To be specific, they’ll have MC Hammer’s new search tool, WireDoo. The rapper-turned-entrepreneur, born Stanley Burrell, announced his brainchild at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco.
Where’s the connection between a music career and a new tech launch? Creativity, says Hammer. Whether in music or in any other field, it’s all from the same side of the brain.
And how exactly will WireDoo be different? Hammer explains WireDoo’s “relationship-driven searches.” Search for zip code 90210, for example, and in addition to the standard search results, the user will find a set of related content offerings — schools, homes, and hospitals, and so on. (No word yet on whether the engine will produce the angst-ridden adventures of the new denizens of West Beverly High School.) Click on “schools,” and the user will find further offerings on areas such as performance scores, teacher credentials, parent demographics, and truancy. Each layer brings the user deeper into the search.
WireDoo, Hammer says, will bring more of what the user is looking for. A search for “car,” he explains, is “not just about the word ‘car,’ but it’s about insurance, it’s about the specs, it’s about mileage, it’s about style, it’s about all these things. So that’s the way it works.”
Rather than relying on the standard keyword spider algorithms, WireDoo, according to Hammer, will ferret out public record information and other web-available material to bring forth what the user really yearns for. The idea feels like a combination of Wolfram|Alpha but with access to more public data. Where this data will come from remains to be seen.
Both skeptics and fans can submit their names and email addresses at the WireDoo site for a chance to become beta testers. Hammer expresses faith that excited and satisfied users will spread the word through social networking and help WireDoo to really dig in and take off… then do the running man.
