Yahoo! Inc has capped a flurry of announcements this week by revealing that it will now be providing a search engine in collaboration with Creative Commons, which is a non-profit organization that works toward making partially copyrighted material available for reuse. This latest move is in keeping with Yahoo's commitment towards building communities rather than just being another distribution site.
Announcing the tie-up with Creative Commons, David Mandelbrot, vice president of search content at Yahoo issued a statement saying, "Yahoo Search is focused on providing innovative, useful technologies that enable people to find, use, share and expand human knowledge," He further stated that Yahoo Creative Commons would encourage students, educators, musicians and writers to share creative work.
Lawrence Lessig, chairman of the board of directors and founder of Creative Commons said that he was very excited at this tie-up with Yahoo. He had this to say in his blog, "So, as I feel like I've said 10,000 times when explaining CC on the road, 'Show me pictures of the Empire State Building that I can use for noncommercial use,' and this is the first of about 13,000 on the list,"
Here is how Yahoo Creative Commons will work. Supposing you are looking for information to use for a school project. Most of the information that you find is protected by copyright and forbids reuse. However, if the site from which you want to use material has a Creative Commons logo then you will be able to know exactly how much material you can reuse and on what conditions to do it. Yahoo will search 'millions of pages' to seek out those with the Creative Commons logo.
In a statement Yahoo said, "We are excited to be working with Creative Commons to enable millions of Yahoo Search users to easily find and use Creative Commons content, and we look forward to helping enable a new generation of creative works based on this new medium."
However, experts are not convinced that this will work; JupiterResearch, a division of Jupitermedia Corp, says that search engines dedicated to a specific topic will dominate the paid-search market in the coming years.
