Creative Commons search engine in the new FireFox

The FireFox browser gets a new search engine for searching public license documents.

By Lars Våge

(December 2 2004) There are probably not many that are familiar with the new search engine for finding material online that can be used without paying royalty or clearing copyright issues.

With a Creative Commons license you can allow others to copy, distribute, quote or develop what you have made available online. You keep your copyright, but at the same time you make it possible for others to profit from it, provided they stay within the limits set by you.

Finding this kind of material is naturally of great interest to e.g. people in the media who need to know if they can use a given text, photo or stream etc. without risking a lawsuit.

Since September a beta version of a Creative Commons search engine has been available that lets you search for just this kind of thing. The results pages display symbols signifying which kind of license applies to the different hits.

The search engine is based on technology from the Open Source search engine project Nutch. The indexing process utilizes Creative Commons meta data in the XML format RDF (as in the semantic web).

This new search engine has not been launched in a big way, but in the new web browser FireFox 1.0 from Mozilla, it has high visibility: In the search box in the upper right corner, the Creative Commons search engine is right there among Google, Yahoo!, Amazon, Ebay and Dictionary.com!

In a press releasee from November 22nd 2004, we are told that the Creative Commons index has 1 million links and that within a short period they aim to include all 5 million web pages known to utilize the CC license.

This article was originally published in Internetbrus, a Swedish blog on search engines and Internet searching that has been online since early 2001. It is written for both searchers and educators.

Internetbrus is owned and edited by Lars Våge and Lars Iselid. Lars Våge works as a librarian at Mitthögskolan and a programmer for JL Informationsteknik. Lars Iselid is a librarian at the Umeå University Library, freelance journalist for the computer magazine Datormagazin, He can be found blogging under the pseudonym Cyrille at Iaslash.org.

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