Yahoo! Image Search is launching a Creative Commons license filter to find images that are available for reuse officially. When you use Yahoo! Image Search, you’ll now see a checkbox for Creative Commons allowing you to filter for images from Flickr that can be used commercially or that can be modified (remixed, tweaked, or built upon) with restrictions set by the image’s creator said Yahoo in their announcement yesterday.
Source: Yahoo Blog
This adds to the set of filters that Yahoo added back in March to improve its search functionality. Currently however, this filter currently pertains only for images in Flickr. Speaking of Flickr, this feature already existed in it and essentially that has been transferred on to Yahoo Image search, so the update isn’t path breaking in anyway. That except for the fact that no other search engine has added this feature yet, so a first from Yahoo stable this. Now the only reason Yahoo had this advantage was because it has Flickr with it. Considering that the only other search engine in a position to add such a feature would be Google because it has Picassa in its stable.
The feature itself will be useful for people who use third party images frequently. And this will include those speakers, bloggers and those who frequently make presentations and perhaps to a certain extent designers. From Yahoo’s perspective they are trying to cash in on those who make presentations as is obvious from their blog post which says, ” Try it and let us know what you think. We bet your next PowerPoint will be prettier than ever.”
The last week of May seems to be good for sharing, as earlier even Wikipedia had announced that all its content will now be available under Creative Commons license. Let’s see if other search engines and publishers begin to follow suit.
