September 29, 2006

Yotophoto For Finding Free Photos Fast

Yotophoto is a fast and easy to use image search engine. There are plenty of image search engines available of course, but that's no reason why there shouldn't be one more. The focus of Yotophoto however is on making 'open and copyleft' images available to educators, bloggers and digital artists. Consequently Yotophoto acts as a multi/meta search engine, scouring resources such as Flickr, Wikipedia, Stock.Xchng, Morguefile, Pixelperfect Digital and OpenPhoto for images in the public domain, or made available under CC, GNU FDL or similar licenses.

The interface is neat and tidy, easy to use and the results are displayed 20 at a time. Images are shown in thumbnail with source, type of license and size displayed below. Advanced search functionality allows for searches on all/any/exclude words, four types of license, 4 image sizes, 3 orientations (landscape, portrait and square) and finally color, either by hex value or from a chart.

This last is quite useful since it would be possible to find images that were the same color as a logo for example, or where photographs needed to fit into a specific website color scheme. I would have liked to have seen an option for b&w/greyscale though.

The searches that I ran all gave me good on topic results, in many cases different to those that I was getting from other image search engines. No need to worry about adult images either; I tried very hard to find some, but was pleased to see that I didn't retrieve any (though searchers should always be wary in case something objectionable slips thru the net).

I don't think that Yotophoto is going to replace your preferred image search engine, but it provides a useful twist and would be a good addition to the searching armory.

Posted by Phil Bradley at 9:42 AM | Permalink

November 9, 2005

Google Adds Option to Limit to Creative Commons Licensed Material

Many sources including Philipp, Nathan, and Tara, have reported that Google has made an addition to their advanced search interface and now allow users to limit their search to content that carries a Creative Commons license.

Is this new limit something we haven't seen before. Nope. Yahoo addded a Creative Commons search limit to their advanced interface (or this standalone site) on March 24th of this year.

Both Tara and Philipp do a great job of breaking down the new Google feature and report on a few problems that include:

+ Wording on results pages (Tara) + Lack of Wikipedia data (Philipp)

Btw, the Creative Commons site search interface allows you to search for content either using the Google or Yahoo database.

For more on finding Creative Commons material, see the SearchDay article: Finding Free Content in the Creative Commons.

Posted by Gary Price at 2:15 PM | Permalink

May 12, 2005

Yahoo Adds New Option to Advanced Search Page

I just noticed that Yahoo has tweaked their advanced search page. You'll now see an new option that allows you to limit your query to material with a Creative Commons license. A Creative Commons "only" search interface is also available. Yahoo and Creative Commons announced a partnership in March. More in this post.

Posted by Gary Price at 10:06 AM | Permalink

March 24, 2005

Yahoo Releases Creative Commons Search Tool

Yahoo has partnered with Creative Commons and released a new resource that restricts a web search (using the Yahoo web index) to content available with a Creative Commons license. You're also able to limit a query to find content available for commercial purposes and/or content that can modified, adapted, or built upon. Most of Yahoo's advanced search syntax appears to work. More in this post.

According to a Yahoo spokesperson, this is the largest one-stop search tool on the web to find material with a Creative Commons license on the web.

Btw, the Creative Commons site also offers a search engine that's powered by Nutch.org open source technology.

Any content creator (photographer, musician, blogger, etc.) can share some or all of their work with others using a Creative Content license. Think of it as a more flexible type of copright license. 11 types of CC licenses are available. If you're not familiar with how it all works, this page provides a great overview.

From the Yahoo news release: The launch of Yahoo! Search for Creative Commons is an important step in a broader movement to enable people to find, share and expand content within a new, more flexible set of copyright laws that ultimately enable the creation of a ?remix? culture and new generation of creative works."

Postscript: Chris wrote about the Creative Commons a couple of weeks ago, describing the mission of the organization and how to find content using its open-source search engine in Finding Free Content in the Creative Commons.

Posted by Gary Price at 1:01 AM | Permalink

November 23, 2004

Updated Version of Creative Commons Search Engine Now Available

A news release on the Creative Commons site lets us know that an "updated version of their Nutch-based search tool is now online. CC Search was "soft launched" in September. Creative Commons also announced that their database is now included in the toolbar that ships with Firefox. The CC Search index now includes about 1 million pages but will soon be increased to all 5 million pages that offer a Creative Commons license.

The Creative Commons search engine helps companies, educators, and artists find content they can re-use without having to call a lawyer, and it offers authors and artists who want to share their work a competitive advantage toward having their work discovered online, said Neeru Paharia, assistant director of Creative Commons and the search engines product manager.

More about Creative Commons Search here. Direct to the search interface here.

Posted by Gary Price at 10:04 PM | Permalink

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