Sunnyvale, California — Companies searching for attractive images online to embed on their websites and in their marketing campaigns can now find them using a new filter from Yahoo!. Yahoo Image Search has rolled out nice update that allows users to filter search results by Creative Commons (CC) license.
The Yahoo Search Blog giving further details said the Creative Commons license filter within its Image Search allows users to search pictures that can be modified and reused commercially.
“When you use Yahoo! Image Search, you will now see a checkbox for Creative Commons allowing you to filter images from Flickr and making it available to all users, and that can be used commercially or that can be modified (remixed, tweaked, or built upon) with restrictions set by the image’s creator.”
In a post on the Yahoo! Search blog, Polly Ng and Anuj Sahai from Yahoo! Image Search said the search engine is proud to be the first image search engine to offer the Creative Commons license.
“By introducing the Creative Commons license search with Flickr and making it available to all our Yahoo! Image Search users, we aim to promote reusable work and to be transparent about the guidelines issued by the creator of a particular image,” they remarked.
The move also would allow Yahoo to drive more traffic to its own photo-sharing site. It will be interesting to see if Google tries a similar strategy with its own photo site Picasa.
The Yahoo Image Search interface in fact appears to be a very nice gateway to the CC-licensed image collection on Flickr, especially because the previews update immediately after you change a filter setting.
Creative Commons licenses empowers content creators to restrict and open up the use of their creations depending on the exact license they choose. Depending on the license, images, for example, can be remixed, used commercially, and shared freely with and without attribution.
This is in addition to the group of filters that Yahoo added back in March to improve its search functionality. Currently however, this filter currently pertains only for images in Flickr.
There are also countless third-party tools available for searching CC-licensed images on Flickr, including compfight, but few are as slick as Yahoo’s Image Search.
Nevertheless, 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.”