Yahoo released the beta of the Yahoo Creative Commons Search allowing us to search among CC licensed material. Since CC licenses are recorded using a standardized meta language and syntax *cough* RDF/XML *cough* it’s more a matter of just checking for this information in the process of their normal operations.
There’s still a lot missing. First of all, the CC license tends to be added to a page, and this can get associated with the keyword. For instance, search on “Shelley Powers” and you won’t find CC material by me, but CC material that includes something about me. (Unless it’s a publication that is CC.). Also, there’s no way to differentiate images, video, and writing with this, though with Yahoo’s separation of media in the regular search engine, this is probably a temporary issue.
Tag this under “RDF rules”.