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      The site, created by Johnny C. Taylor, Jr., is a web search engine, dedicated to placing the requests and perspectives of African American first. 

      “Folks have described us as the black Google,” Taylor said. “It’s the first of its kind search engine for our community. It’s not a website – a search engine. It is a place where we can come and find anything that we currently get from Google, Yahoo, and MSN. You can now find it at a place that’s made for us, by us. It’s a hot new product. We have all the jobs in the world – we crawl the World Wide Web for jobs and cutting-edge news, not just black news, but the latest news.”

     A corporate lawyer by trade, Taylor is giving his testimony for RushmoreDrive to pretty much anyone who will listen. The exec hopes to get the word out about the new search tool specifically targeting the African American web user.

      “We’re on a promotional tour. We started in Chicago went to Nashville, Atlanta, Cincinnati, L.A. Things are good, God is good,” Taylor told EUR’s Lee Bailey who caught up with him while in Los Angeles at casting director Robi Reed's annual shindig.

      “We can spread a rumor in a second. It’s time to spread some good news,” he added about getting the word out about RushmoreDrive. “And the good news is we finally have our own search engine. I’m pleased to say, at the end of our second full operating month we had 800,000 unique visitors, so business is good, but we need more of ‘em.”

      The idea of RushmoreDrive came up when Taylor himself was doing a little web research. His father (no, not the late R&B/blues singer) was suffering from prostate cancer and Taylor turned to the Internet to find information about cancer and African American issues.

     “The notion came upon me that anybody can search, but I was having great difficulty finding things that matter to us,” Taylor said. “You’d like to think things like cancer are race neutral, but cancer is black or white. How we get it, the things that impact how black people deal with the treatment regimen – all that is different. I looked for it, but there is really nothing that spoke to how black men deal with [it]. So I said, ‘Gosh, it would be great if we could merge all the stuff from the National Cancer Society, the National Institute of Health, all the right places, the authorities, but also get that information that is specifically relevant to black people because then we are making a difference. Knowledge is power. I really believe that.”

      Taylor continued that the basic idea behind the site was to give users everything the web has to offer, but elevate search returns most relevant to African Americans.

      “Google has much of the information that we have, but it’s on page 50, it’s on page 100, it’s on page 1,000. What we do is elevate the black results to the first three pages, which differentiates us,” Taylor explained.

      The idea of a search engine that specifically finds information by relevancy for the African American community might actually sound pretty simple. Most users, as Taylor found, would simply preface their search or include in their search the word ‘black’. But Taylor explained that it isn’t as easy as it sounds. In fact, the tech exec describes the process as “hard as all get-out.”

      “Everyone thought what we would simply do is take a term like ‘comedy’ and prefix ‘black’ or ‘African American.’ But you find out very quickly that ‘black comedy’ on a search engine does not give you Martin Lawrence and Eddie Murphy. It gives you dark humor. So it’s not as simple as prefixing ‘black’ and ‘African American’ to your search terms. There is a real algorithm,” he said.

      RushmoreDrive is a sister company to the search engine Ask.com. It has a staff of 35, including engineers working to build the algorithm that's used.

      “It is the first time the African American community has a legitimate technology play; a search engine.”

      As for the name, well, that actually is simple. It's the name of the street where the company was founded in April 2008. Taylor latched on to the moniker for its simplicity and built in slogan.

      “I liked it because it was easy to spell and the action words: Rush for more information and you drive the web instead of searching the web,” he said. “Our first angle was to found a business and finding a name was the last thing we did. We launched the company in April and didn’t figure out our name until February because the idea was to figure out what our community wants. We had focus groups. I found that black folks wanted something. They didn’t want a black search engine; they wanted a search engine for the black community. So RushmoreDrive is a search tool at its core, complemented by features like jobs and news.”

      Check out the search engine for the black community at www.rushmoredrive.com.

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