Yahoo returns to its roots with Flickr acquisition, CC search engine

I used to use Yahoo back when it was run out of a dorm room at Stanford, and still had a Stanford URL. Back then, Yahoo relied on volunteer labor to submit and categorize the growing numbers of URLs that made up a WWW that was at the time quite small. That's why Yahoo's recent acquisition of Flickr, a community-based photo sharing and indexing site, represents something of a return to the company's roots. Flickr hosts user-submitted photos, which are then tagged with descriptive metadata by community members and made available through the site's photo search engine. It's good stuff, and it represents a model that could be extended to multiple types of media besides photos.

Yahoo, knows that the Flickr model is flexible, especially the community-based content creation aspect, which is why they just launched a search site that's dedicated to indexing and making available works published via the Creative Commons license. Larry Lessig, one of CC's creators, helped Yahoo implement the new search, and he had this to say about it on his blog.

Late last night, Yahoo! launched a Creative Commons search engine, permitting you to search the web, filtering results on the basis of Creative Commons licenses. 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.

This is exciting news for us. It confirms great news about Yahoo!. I met their senior management last October. They had, imho, precisely the right vision of a future net. Not a platform for delivering whatever, but instead a platform for communities to develop. With the acquisition of Flickr, the step into blogging and now this tool to locate the welcome mats spread across the net, that vision begins to turn real.

I tried out the new search beta, and at the moment most of what it returns is blog-based material. But that should change as more types of works become available under the Creative Commons license.

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