Flickr has been offering users the ability to search by Creative Commons license since mid-2006, and I've been waiting for Yahoo to implement such a feature in their image search for quite a while.
I was pleased today to see an announcement that Yahoo has finally added a search by Creative Commons license to their advanced search feature.
Upon closer inspection of the new feature, however, I noticed this note on the search page:
Note: Only Flickr images are supported currently in this Filter.
So apparently the new feature adds no additional functionality beyond what you would get from searching for images on Flickr.
Sure, it would be a very difficult undertaking to set up a system to properly tag images outside their system, but I was hoping that after three years they might have been working to expand the scope of Creative Commons tagging beyond Flickr.
In the end, it's still a move in the right direction; though it is perhaps a smaller move than I had expected after reading the headlines.