Pointed out that the narrowing function of 'Creative Commons License' in Google Image Search is broken



Google search allows you to search for images related to specific words, including a function to search for images that are allowed to be reused under

Creative Commons . However, ``Google Image Search's Creative Commons filter is broken, and you can hardly find licensed images,'' reports blogger Alan Levine.

Google Broke Image Search for Creative Commons and Hardly Anyone Noticed/Cares – CogDogBlog
https://cogdogblog.com/2022/09/google-broke-cc-image-search/

If you do an image search on Google, you will see a mixture of images that are free to use and those that are not. However, the 2020 update added the ability to easily narrow down search results by 'Creative Commons license' or 'Commercial and other licenses'.

An update adds a function that allows you to easily search for images that can be used for free with Google image search - GIGAZINE



If you want to narrow down image search results by Creative Commons or commercial and other licenses, click 'Tools' at the bottom right of the search form after performing an image search and select 'License' from the menu that opens.



Then, it is said that you can narrow down the images to be displayed from 'All', 'Creative Commons license', 'Commercial and other licenses'.



One day Mr. Levine wrote a blog post containing the word 'Front Door'. At this time, he said that he used Google image search to find the image of 'Door' used for the top image. The following is the result of Mr. Levine actually performing a Google image search on 'Door' and narrowing it down with 'Creative Commons License'. Only 7 images are shown, clearly not covering the 'Door' images that are licensed under Creative Commons.



In fact, Mr. Levine has posted several open-licensed images on the image-sharing site Flickr , including 440 images of 'Door', none of which appear in Google Image Search. I did. Of course, besides the images taken by Mr. Levine, there are a lot of images of 'Door' licensed by Creative Commons, but you can not find them using Google image search.



Also, when Mr. Levine narrowed down by 'Creative Commons License' in the image search of 'dog', only three images were displayed. A similar situation has occurred with other words such as 'cat', but Levine says that no one was able to find anyone on the Internet who noticed this and raised their voice.



This is the result of image search with the word 'dog' using the editorial staff's PC as a trial and narrowing down by 'Creative Commons License'. Only 4 licensed images surrounded by a red frame are displayed, and images that seem to be advertisements without license information are also displayed.



In addition, when searching for Japanese 'dog' and narrowing down by 'Creative Commons License', no images were displayed.



Mr. Levine investigated why the 'Creative Commons license' of Google Image search was failing and found a problem with the URL parameters. In general, if you search for 'dog' in Google Image Search and narrow it down with 'Creative Commons License', the search results will be displayed with the following URL.

https://www.google.com/search?q=dog&tbm=isch&tbs=il:cl

Among these, 'q=dog' represents the search word, 'tbm=isch' indicates that it is an image search, and 'tbs=il:cl' indicates that only Creative Commons licenses are returned as results. means However, in reality, image search cannot be performed successfully with this URL.

When Mr. Levine consulted with a person related to Creative Commons about this matter, it was reported that the following URL would display results that satisfy the three elements of the correct 'dog', 'image search', and 'creative commons license'. It was said that it was done.

https://www.google.com/search?q=dog&tbm=isch&tbs=sur:fmc,il:cl

As a test, if you perform an image search with Japanese 'dog'

and insert 'sur: fmc,' into the URL narrowed down with 'Creative Commons License', the following Creative Commons licensed image was displayed staggeredly.



From the above results, it can be seen that the part 'tbs=sur:fmc' included in the URL plays an important role in narrowing down the 'Creative Commons license'. However, adding 'tbs=sur:fmc' to every URL is troublesome and can only be used as a trick.

Mr. Levine believes that the flaws found this time were caused when Google made changes to the search tool at some point, but have been neglected ever since. 'I found Google broken, but no one seems to care about this,' 'Google Image Search is watered down, so I don't use it much,' Levine said. , we recommend using the open source content search tool '

OpenVerse ' when searching for Creative Commons images.



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