MC Hammer Is Working On His Own Search Engine, Seriously

MC Hammer is working on a new search engine and u can’t touch it, because it’s not available to the public yet. Hammer made an appearance at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco not as a washed-up celebrity looking for attention, but actually as the brains behind the up-and-coming web search “WireDoo.” Thankfully, unlike Hammer himself, his parachute pants seem to have been unable to escape the 1990s. I’m really sorry everyone, these jokes are pretty much obligatory.

Hammer was quick to stress that WireDoo is not intended to compete with search giants like Google. Of course, this kind of goes without saying. Start-ups “compete” with Google much in the same way that someone “listens” to MC Hammer: You try it for about 3 seconds just to see if it’s possible and then you give up forever. No, Hammer’s new search is intended to provide a “deeper type of search” that provides “relationship” responses to queries.

What that actually means is a little unclear, but Hammer gave a few examples. If you were to search “car” for instance. WireDoo might return results about insurance, pricing, and consumer safety ratings. Basically it seems like WireDoo is intended to try and outsmart you by searching for things that are related to your query instead of the query itself. A “Let-me-Google-that-for-you” engine. Can’t knock it til you’ve tried it, but that doesn’t sound like my cup of tea.

Still, best of luck to the dude I guess. All kidding aside, he may be on to an idea that could carve out a little niche for itself despite the fact that everyone will forever associate it with the MC Hammer Slide. Maybe. I just hope he has a good enough sense of humor to realize that this sounds like the setup to some sort of absurdist, anti-humor joke.

Also: Stop. Hammertime. Couldn’t really shoehorn that in anywhere else. I like bad jokes and even I wouldn’t read an article that opened with that line.

(via New York Times)

Relevant to your interest in search engines. We have no other MC Hammer stories.

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