Creative Commons has announced its Nutch-based search engine. It crawls CC-licensed pages, indexing license properties, making them searchable. I did most of the initial development, using it as a motivating case when adding metadata support to Nutch. Now I’ve handed it off to Mike Linksvayer at the Creative Commons. Battelle already blogged it, showing that he has the scoop on even the developers!
This is cool in several ways. It demonstrates how easily Nutch can be extended to do stuff that would be hard to do with any other search engine. (This is all of the CC-specific code.) It’s also cool since it helps folks find content they can reuse, like songs that can be sampled, art that can be clipped and text that can be excerpted.
