I never heard about Creative Commons, and I wanted to learn more about it before I dove into the search bar. On the about page, it says, “Creative Commons’ “CC Search” project will develop and release an open online search and re-use tool that will allow high-quality content from the commons to surface in a more seamless and accessible way” (Creative Commons). I looked up Game of Thrones. I love the show and was curious to see what results I would find. Many texts that I tried looking up on Creative Commons didn’t show any results or they simply did not have a lot, but this came up with several pages of results. I expected to see many pictures and stills from the show, but the first two pages were pictures from (what I believe is) Comic-Con.
The most interesting example in my search was the picture of stormtroopers from Star Wars sitting on/ standing around the iron throne. I thought it was really funny because clearly there aren’t any stormtroopers in Game of Thrones, but the idea of them being around the most-known Game of Thrones prop was funny, like a strange crossover. Also, in my results, there were photos of a fake direwolf (a wolf on the show) that someone made out of shaggy fabric. I believe those pictures were probably the most abstract to my search because I didn’t know what it was right away. I had to click the picture to find out.
I decided to search a term that we discussed in class and see where that brought me. I typed in “multimedia,” which resulted in 142 pages worth of content. Although I didn’t search through this topic as thoroughly as I did for Game of Thrones, I could see by clicking through the first couple of pages that the content was extremely diverse because the topic/keyword is wide.
The benefit to Creative Commons is that you’re able to search through content that you might not have been able to find before, and it also gives the credit to the person who owns the picture – which is something that I think can get ignored when someone is using google, even if Google does tell the website where the picture is taken from. However, what’s limiting about CreativeCommons is that the search can only do so much. I agree with what Jordyn has posted before me. When I tried to look up for The Outsiders by S.E Hinton, I didn’t get any examples relevant to what I was specifically looking for. Instead, most of the pictures were of people outside – which, to be fair, I should’ve expected. However, I thought the search would have a broader range of content.
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Works Cited:
“Search.” Creative Commons, Creative Commons, ccsearch.creativecommons.org/
Hatfield, Derek. “Storm Troopers on the Game of Thrones.” Creative Commons, Creative Commons, 2012, ccsearch.creativecommons.org/image/detail/RfTJI3FfqGDTd9zpGYYtSg==.