Google Images now integrates Creative Commons Searches

9th July 2009

posted in digitalstorytelling, intellectualproperty |

This is good news. In addition to CompFight and FlickrStorm, add Google Advanced Image Search to your list of search options for Creative Commons images. According to the official Google Blog yesterday (July 9, 2009):

Today, we’re launching a feature on Image Search to help you find images that you can use for free, while respecting the wishes of artists and creators. This feature allows you to restrict your Image Search results to images that have been tagged with licenses like Creative Commons, making it easier to discover images from across the web that you can share, use and even modify. Your search will also include works that have been tagged with other licenses, like GNU Free Documentation license, or are in the public domain.

I still think I like the interfaces of CompFight and FlickrStorm for image searches better than Google, and I REALLY like the “save in my tray” feature of FlickrStorm for research use (archiving the URLs for later inclusion in a works cited / bibliography) but this is a good step forward for Google Image search.

Hat tip to Sherri Pankurst for letting me know about this.

Technorati Tags:
cc, commons, copyright, creative, creativecommons, google, search, image, images

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 9th, 2009 at 11:39 pm and is filed under digitalstorytelling, intellectualproperty. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

1 On July 9th, 2009, Rhondda said:

Thanks for the info. I had not noticed this but will check it out. I like FlickrStorm and Compfight as well but a lot of students use Google to search and they are starting to “get” CC so it is good that it is available here too.

2 On July 10th, 2009, Lee Kolbert said:

Hi Wes,
I just discovered this as well, though I’m disappointed that they hid the setting so deeply. They added a few drill-down choices right on the search page. You can now select (within your results) for type, size and color-dominance (which I think is particularly helpful if trying to stick to a color-scheme). I know real estate is tight on the main page, but you’d think copyright is such as issue on the web, that Creative Commons would have just a little higher importance than being able to choose color-dominance.
~Lee