Today we announce a search engine prototype exclusively for finding Creative Commons licensed and public domain works on the web.

Indexing only pages with valid Creative Commons metadata allows the search engine to display a visual indicator of the conditions under which works may be used as well as offer the option to limit results to works available licenses allowing for derivatives or commercial use.

This prototype partially addresses one of our tech challenges. It still needs lots of work. If you’re an interested developer you can obtain the code and submit bugs via the cctools project at SourceForge. The code is GNU GPL licensed and builds in part upon Nathan Yergler’s ccRdf library.

We also have an outstanding challenge to commercial search engines to build support for Creative Commons-enhanced searches.