Creative Commons (www.creativecommons.org) unveiled on November 22 an updated beta version of its search engine (http://search.creativecommons.org/index.jsp), which crawls the web for text, images, audio and video free to re-use on certain terms a search refinement offered by no other company or organization today. Creative Commons’ announcement coincides with the Mozilla Foundation’s release of its industry-leading browser, Firefox 1.0 (www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/), which now features the Creative Commons search technology in its toolbar alongside such leading search services as Google, Yahoo, Amazon, eBay and Dictionary.com.
The search engine was developed with the help of Nutch.org (www.nutch.org), an open-source search developer. Creative Commons metadata is based on a language known as Resource Description Framework (RDF) using Extensible Mark-up Language (XML) as an interchange syntax, designed and standardized by World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the Web standards-setting body. The beta search engine indexes just under one million web pages, but Creative Commons expects it will soon index the full five million pages known to carry Creative Commons licenses today.
Neeru Paharia, assistant director of Creative Commons and the search engine’s product manager, said that the Creative Commons search engine helps companies, educators and artists find content they can re-use without having to call a lawyer, and that it offers authors and artists who want to share their work a competitive advantage toward having their work discovered online. Mike Linksvayer, Chief Technical Officer of Creative Commons, said that Creative Commons will keeping working with Nutch.org and other metadata initiatives to index more document types and offer domain-specific and reuse-specific searches, to find music with a certain tempo or works that incorporate a specific piece of film footage.
