Tuesday, September 07, 2004

Creative Commons Search Engine Review

I found a link to the creative commons search engine and thought I'd give it a whirl. First off it's powered by Nutch, an open source search engine, which means they didn't have to spend any money on a commercial engine (very cool). Secondly, it's a search engine of RDF feeds so it's a feed search engine but they give reviews of the feeds and an explaination of the way each feed or post was scored. Additionally, the creative commons search engine has icons next to each listing that give a bit more information from a "Creative Commons" standpoint.

The main features of the creative commons RDF search engine are:
1. Ability to exclude feeds (web sites) that forbid commercial use of their rss feed.
2. Ability to exclude feeds (web sites) that forbid derivative works.
3. Ability to restrict search to documents with strict format metadata.
The meta data formats include (audio, image, interactive, text and video).

The majority of the entries are from blogs and not defacto standard web sites which I guess is to be expected even though the search engine doesn't explicitly say it's only for RDF feeds. It merely stats that it's "RDF enhanced". I also found that many "feed aggregators" were skewing the results by merely reposting other folk's blog items to their site irregardless of whether or not the originating site has a copyright disclaimer. The best example I found was a search for "search engine marketing" and I checked the box saying I wanted to make commercial use of the content and was flooded with results from Teledyn.com's feed aggregator pages. I'd say that's a pretty big loophole around the creative commons license.

The Creative Commons Search Engine Disclaimer
I think it's important to note that the creative commons search engine spider is finding sites that meet the following requirements.
"This search finds web pages with metadata indicating a Creative Commons license or public domain dedication. User must examine each page to determine what content, if any, has been licensed."

In simple tech-speak that means a site needs to either link to the Creative Commons homepage or to their license. Every page I checked that was included in search results on the site had a link back to the creative commons site in one shape or form.

Pretty ingenious backlink building strategy if you ask me.

Posted By Jason Dowdell at 01:33 PM
Permanent Link: Creative Commons Search Engine Review | Comments (1)

(1) Comments on Creative Commons Search Engine Review

The URL for creative commons search engine posted above is presently returning 404. Seems like it has moved here:

http://search.creativecommons.org/

However, the functionality of this URL does not appear to have anything to do with feeds. I wonder what gives ...

Comments by Vic : Thursday, November 09, 2006 at 02:17 PM

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