Compared to giants such as Google and Flickr, the Creative Commons website itself is not a small amount of traffic, although it already provides tool options for filtering CC-licensed images.

As early as February 2017, the organization revealed that it had nearly 60,000 monthly visits, which is a source of motivation for its search experience. When CC CEO Ryan Merkley announced the new plan, he said:

“There is no room for creative public domain, but people need a tool for managing, sharing, and remixing work. We want CC to become more practical and take a step in this direction.”

In the early days of the beta release, the CC search engine indexed approximately 9.5 million images from Flickr, 500px, Rijksmuseum, the New York Public Library, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Today, CC Search has included more than 300 million images from 19 sources, including the Cleveland Museum of Art, Behance, DeviantArt, and even a series of CC0 3D designs from Thingiverse.

According to the organization, its image library will continue to grow and give high priority to photo collections from resource libraries such as Europeana and Wikimedia Commons.

From the current homepage UI, search engines are ushered in more changes, such as clearer homepages, improved navigation and filters, more consistent design with the creativecommons.org main site, more concise attribution options, and feedback. The channel is also clearer.

According to the organization, users can experience improvements in load time and phrase search relevance and have added analysis to help the team understand how it is being used. Looking ahead, CC Search is clearly not just a search engine for images, but it is expected to include more content.