The Creative Commons website is a “…project [that] 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.” (CC Search Prototype).
For this search through Creative Commons, I wasn’t sure what I wanted to search at first. I initially typed in search terms like “television,” “video,” and “broadcast,” but I wanted more variety in my search results. I wanted to find a search term that was going to yield a lot of different results, not just a lot of the same thing. I then decided to search the word “beauty.” I got 59 pages of results (with 100 images per web page) with many different types of images, from people, to landscapes, to flowers, to animals.
These images are all from the first two pages of results, and show just some of the variety in the search results on “beauty.” I chose these one in particular because they were not “inappropriate” (not half naked), and they all caught my eye as I was scrolling through all of the images. There was something about these images that stuck out to me.
I also chose to stay within the basic Creative Commons search that most people, if using this site, would use because it shows the types of media that could be used by an everyday person who comes across the site. There were some benefits to this – if you were looking for images and only images, you could find many to chose from, and you would not need to ask special permissions to use them – they are free for anyone to use. It’s an easy way to find images and “texts” that someone can remix.
However, there are some disadvantages – no other media options are available from the main search, which, as a broadcasting major who works with video, is a little frustrating. Moreover, there is only so much remixing you can do with only images to work with; with more variety of media, someone could make a new and interesting text, but without those readily available from the basic search option makes it appear that those media aren’t there (as Vivian points out it is possible to find after some searching through the site in her blogpost).
Works Cited:
CC Search Prototype, ccsearch.creativecommons.org/about.