There is no larger compendium of shared human knowledge and creativity than
the Commons, including over 1.1 billion digital works available under CC
licenses. Despite the tremendous growth of the Commons, and the widespread use
of the CC licenses and public domain marks, there is no simple way to maximize
use of, and engagement with, all of that content. There is no front door — no
tool designed for the general public to facilitate discovery for the purpose
of reuse and remix, to simplify the license terms, make attribution easy, or
support curation, and crowdsourced metadata.

Creative Commons' “CC Search” project 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. Our first prototype relies
on open APIs and focuses on photos as its first media type. It is meant to
elicit discussion and inform our development as we build out the full set of
tools. “CC Search” will enable users to curate, tag, and remix that content.
It will go beyond simple search to aggregate results from across the hundreds
of public repositories into a single ledger, and also facilitate the use and
re-use through tools like curated lists, saved searches, one- or no-click
attribution, and provenance.