yowkee essential

The above is shown in Google Advanced Search. There is a new criteria for search filtering based on Usage Right:

• aren’t filtered by license
• allow some forms of re-use
• can be freely modified, adapted or built upon

Google seem to use Creative Commons to identify the license of the pages it archived. Truely that is big effort spent to make this work.

On the other hand, Yahoo Advanced Web Search seem long having the option to filter your search based on licensed content. And it specify to use CC. It’s CC search option is shown as figure below. Here’s its tips:

• This special Yahoo! Search finds pages that have content with a Creative Commons license

Google’s approach is not to confuse the users with less information provided. Yahoo’s approach seem to be more appropriate if users know what actually is CC.

Would users really care which license was specified? Not really, might not at the stage when they go to the search engine. At the first place, they might want to look for something could be freely distributed, or some licensed content. When it was found, the license details has to be further studied then.

Also, would it mean Google plan to identify web content or downloaded softwares which use GPL, BSD ….etc licenses?

• Reference: Joi Ito’s Google + CC = Good