In browsing the Creative Commons, I started by looking through the website. I checked the about page and the search options to get an idea of the kinds of things that were available in the database. As far as I could tell, Creative Commons search offers mostly images. I never got a result that was not some kind of image.
To start off with, I searched ‘rabbit’ because I have a rabbit notepad on my desk. From these search results, I saw that most of them were fairly similar pictures: a rabbit sitting on grass. I even though most them were from the same person, but on further inspection I realized the name of the author or uploader was different for many of them. The similarity in pictures made me wonder if the website searches for images that are visually similar and puts them together in search results.
Next, I did a search for ‘cosmic’ because I was listening to a band that had that word in the title, and I figured there would be some interesting results from it. There were a few pictures that I expected, like art of planets and things like that, but one thing that I was not expecting was a bunch of pictures of what looks like a very old card game called ‘Cosmic Encounter.’ I thought it was interesting that a card game was one of the first results.
Finally, to see what kinds of pictures I would get, I searched the word ‘pink.’ I got a lot of generic pictures, but fairly high up in the search results were various older drawing and paintings from throughout history, which I thought was interesting. Like other people wrote in their blog posts, I was not expecting to find results from so long ago.
Overall, I think this search is useful for finding general images that are available for use and modification, but I do not think the search engine is specific enough. As Kiera said, the only way results show up is if they have the word you searched in the title, and I was unable to figure out how the website categorizes which search results to show first. If you have something very specific in mind, I don’t think this would be very helpful.
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