Open Access News

News from the open access movement


Monday, July 28, 2008

Web searching with CC licenses

Francis Deblauwe, Web Search & CC Licenses, iCommons.org, June 9, 2008.
How many web search engines actually allow to filter for Creative Commons-licensed materials? How many websites allow you to search for CC-licensed images only? How about videos and audio materials? ...

The major, well-known sites that allow CC filtering are Yahoo! and the photo sharing site Flickr. Google basically offers the same convenience but uses plainer wording such as "free to use or share." A few websites use Google’s or Yahoo!’s search technology and rights filtering, e.g., AOL, Go.com. Blip.tv and SpinXpress offer CC filtering for videos and images. Surprisingly, the Internet Archive does not provide CC-licensing as a criterion in searches. After some digging, I found that they offer a cumbersome workaround though. ...

All in all, adoption of CC filtering on search websites is far from widespread. We still have a lot of work to do! In the meantime, the Creative Commons website offers a good search feature that leverages the best of the search site breed.