Creative Commons has officially launched its new search engine. CC Search lets users search for images that are free to use under a Creative Commons license. And with 300 million images having been indexed, the chances are you'll find what you're looking for.

Creative Commons Ups Its Search Game

In February 2017, Creative Commons launched a new search engine. The previous search engine offered links to other sources such as Google Images, Flickr, and Pixabay. Which meant it wasn't really a search engine at all, but just links to other search engines.

The new Creative Commons search engine was designed to provide a simpler, but more extensive, search engine. However, indexing 300 million images from across the internet was a major undertaking, which meant CC Search has spent over two years in beta.

CC Search Launches Out of Beta

Now, Creative Commons has officially launched CC Search, taking it out of beta. CC Search offers a simple yet effective way of searching through the whole Commons' archive of images. In total, this consists of 300 million images across 19 collections.

According to the Creative Commons Blog, when you do a search using CC Search you're scouring images "pulled from open APIs and the Common Crawl dataset. These include "cultural works from museums," "graphic designs and art works," and "photos from Flickr".

The new CC Search keeps things very simple. Just search for a word or phrase, and you'll see images which Creative Commons' algorithm thinks fit the bill. You can instantly see the source of the images and their Creative Commons license.

If you want to filter the results, just click the Filter button. Here you can filter by "Use for commercial purposes" or "Modify or adapt". You can also limit your search to specific CC licenses, limit your search to specific providers, or search by creator.

Don't Steal Other People's Images

If you're looking for more sources for images you're free to use, check out these websites full of copyright-free photographs. And we cannot stress the importance of only using images you have permission to use, as anything else constitutes stealing people's work.