Creative Commons is thrilled to confirm that CC Search, the search engine we built for openly licensed content, has found a new home and will soon be joining WordPress. With its talented team and active community of open source contributors from all around the globe, WordPress is the perfect partner to help keep the project growing and flourishing in the years ahead.

Our teams are still finalizing details and timing, and we’ll be sharing updates with you as we get closer to the finish line.

Every month around 300,000 users come to CC Search and discover CC-licensed content that they are free to use, share, and build upon. Our index of images totals over 500 million, and the meta search we built for audio and video allows broad discovery of those content types from other services. There is unlimited potential for what early on was referred to as the “front door to the Commons.” 

As it turns out, the greatest beneficiaries of CC Search thus far have been in the education space. The majority of CC Search users identify as teachers, researchers, students, and librarians, who are studying and creating new materials on a daily basis.

At the CC Global Summit in 2020, we shared early prototypes of audio search integration, with plans for video following closely behind. It is deeply gratifying that this vision for growth will be honored by the team at WordPress, with their publicly stated intentions to expand the service in both depth and breadth.

We are proud of having proven the CC Search concept and launched the product, and excited for it to benefit from the vast technical resources and enthusiastic community at the WordPress project. Please join us in celebrating this excellent match, and stay tuned for more details.