Google has a new competitor: '80s pop music superstar MC Hammer.

The artist, who lives in the San Francisco area, got together with some tech industry friends and after brainstorming for innovative projects decided to develop a search engine, he said on Wednesday at the Web 2.0 Summit.

The project, called WireDoo, is in a very early stage and focuses on providing information that is related to a search query, and leads users to deeper data, he said.

"We're early on, just giving you a glance of what we're working on," MC Hammer told the audience.

In a demo of the service, which he describes as "deep, relationship search," he ran queries for the 90210 Beverly Hills zip code and for Apple's stock symbol. For the zip code query, the engine displayed options to explore related information like schools, homes and crime rates, and to drill down further in each. For the Apple query, the engine offered stock information, including a mutual fund ownership snapshot.

MC Hammer, who said he bumped into Google co-founder Sergey Brin backstage at the conference, said WireDoo isn't meant to replicate what Google and other search engines do.

Rather, WireDoo is being designed to offer an incremental set of features that aggregate in a single place complementary data around a search query, he said.