Praise the Lord of the Web! Google Finally Launches Creative Commons Image Search

To date, whenever I've needed free-to-use Creative Commons 2.0 or 2.5 images for blog posts or other projects I've been relegated to either Wikipedia or Flickr for my image searches. No longer will that be the case, thanks to a typically simple, yet broadly important

announcement via the Google Operating System blog:

Google Image Search added the option to restrict the results to images that are licensed using Creative Commons, a list of flexible licenses that allow content creators to share their works with the world.

The options aren't yet available in the interface, but you can use the search box [here] to find images that are licensed using some of the most popular Creative Commons licenses.

The new CC search is already turning up great results and will clearly be an invaluable prosumer resource for years to come. It's certainly going to make this blog more visually appealing, entertaining and just plain weird (sometimes the image results are just too funny to not include in a piece, no matter how tangentally relevant, ie this is the first CC 2.5 result for the search term "future").

So I'm now flipping the hourglass as I await full-on Creative Commons integration for YouTube. Keep bringing it, Google. I dare you to make my life even easier. Meow.