Barry Diller, the chairman and CEO of IAC, which owns Ask.com, Match.com, Evite, and College Humor, among many others, has just launched Rushmore Drive, a new online community geared toward blacks and centered around an "ethnic," Ask.com-powered search engine that delivers both mainstream results and results targeted toward African Americans. "Every person is looking for a more relevant search result," Johnny Taylor, head of IAC's Black Web Enterprises Inc. unit and chief executive of RushmoreDrive.com, told the Charlotte Observer. "It recognizes who you are, so you can find what you're looking for every time."
Is that true? Just to test out that theory, and being of the core demographic, I searched some general terms on both Rushmore Drive and Ask.com to see how the first-page results differed. The first result on Rushmore Drive was usually something mainstream like Travelocity or Monster.com, but the subsequent results were very clearly pointed in the "African American" direction, but not always helpfully so. Ex: My search for "food" yielded "Chitterlings.com." So not interested. You sort of get the idea that the Rushmore Drive engine just adds "black and African American" to your search terms. I'm not planning on switching from Google anytime soon, but it should be interesting to see how it evolves with more use. Plus, when I searched "blog," Stereohyped wasn't on the first page. Boo.
Check out some selections from my experiment after the jump.
Travel
On Rushmore Drive: Black Travel: Soul of America, Black Travel Online, Festival at Sea: African American Themed Vacations
On Ask.com: Lonely Planet, Expedia, Fodors
Employment
On Rushmore Drive: Monster.com, Black Populaton Census Data, Jobs@BlackRefer.com
On Ask.com: Monster.com, Job-Hunt.org, NationJob.com
Music
On Rushmore Drive: Archives of African American Music and Culture at Indiana University, Blackquest.com, Center for Black Music Research
On Ask.com: Music For Robots (really?), Yahoo! Music, AOL Music
Dating
On Rushmore Drive: BlackPeopleMeet.com, CityMatchmaking.com, AfricaLove.com
On Ask.com: Match.com, Lovesites.com, Dating.about.com
Food
On Rushmore Drive: A History of Soul Food, Soulfoodcookbook.com, Chitterlings.com
Editor
Lauren Williams Editor-at-Large
Cord Jefferson Editorial Director
David Hauslaib Managing Editor
Andrew Belonsky Publisher
Jossip Initiatives
All Hip Hop
The Assimilated Negro
The B Life
Black Agenda Report
Black Male Appreciation
Black Prof
Black Voices
Bossip
Cake & Ice Cream
Clips and Kisses
Clutch Magazine
Concrete Loop
Crunk & Disorderly
Essence
EUR Web
The Fashion Bomb
Giant
Greasy Guide
Hip Candy
HipHopDX
Hip & Pop
Juicy News
King
Miss Info
Mollygood
My Urban Report
Nah Right
Necole Bitchie
Nova Slim
Panache Report
Racialicious
The Rap Up
Rhymes With Snitch
Sandra Rose
Shake Your Beauty
Straight Outta NYC
SOHH
TMZ
Vibe
Wendy Williams
XXL
Young, Black, Fabulous
Someone should tell them that men on match.com don't date black women. They sleep with them, sure, but they don't date them. Black men included.
I'm seriously not kidding you. I'm not sure if that's the case in all areas but it certainly is in mine.
…and yeah, I feel bad for not supporting them but Google is oh so perfect. I should know better though. Google Calendar was down earlier this week and I missed three appointments.
@ daria-so true, a girlfriend of mine had a terrible experience w/ match.com but if you only watched the TV commercials, you'd never know.
About this search engine: How will it be different to find things related to African-Americans versus Google & Yahoo? Someone fill me in.
It's owned by black people??
sophisAKAted, I joined match and got a bunch of "winks" from mostly black and white guys. Some of them seemed promising until I looked at their profile and saw that none of them had race preferences that included blacks. I'm not ethnically ambiguous so why bother? How am I going to go on a date with a man who flat out says that he doesn't care for black women? I went on a date with a Persian guy before taking down my profile but no sparks and there weren't any others in a 10 mile radius who seemed promising.
Wow. even search engines are segregated.
Stephen Levitt addressed online dating and racial preferences in Freakonomics. He noticed that even people who said they had no preference overwhelmingly responded only to white prospects.
souldecirce, that's to be expected if said people are white just as I'd assume most black people who listed "no preference" would actually look for black people… though that's not the case.