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While working on a freelance project today about Afrocentrism, I got ready to visit RushmoreDrive.com when I saw it redirecting to a site called Life123.com. After clicking on it a few more times, I finally used Google to find out whether there was a name change for this first-ever African-American focused search engine. I was disappointed to read on Huffington Post's Web site that RushmoreDrive.com was shut down on Friday, June 12 by InterActiveCorp (IAC).

Johnny Taylor, RushmoreDrive.com's chief executive, resigned after the shutdown and 17 employees were laid off. IAC's Black Web Enterprises closed too. IAC also shut down its comedy site 23/6 and ReserveAmerica earlier this year, but RushmoreDrive.com was the one I really wanted to see hang in there. However, if this happened in June and I'm just now finding out about the issue in October, that tells you how much I used RushmoreDrive.com.

The search engine I use most is Google. I haven't even got into the swing of using Yahoo Search or Bing because Google is the most convenient considering it's sitting right on the top panel of my Internet Explorer 8.0. But there are certain topics that I want to cut down to a certain focus group, and RushmoreDrive.com was the site I'd go to (like today) to utilize those search engine perks. I'd recommended the link on my Web site and would always tell people to use it even though I wasn't making as much use of it as I could have.

So what do you think? Is it necessary to have another African-American focused search engine or are the current search engines sufficient? Did you use RushmoreDrive.com? Do you think it would've been used more if the exposure was higher?