Creative Commons Statistics Generator

This statistic generator queries Yahoo! for back-links to Creative Commons licences. To be licensed under a Creative Commons licence, content (text, pictures, graphics etc) needs to link to a licence URI. The number of backlinks gives some insight into the amount of CC licenced works available on the Internet.

The inherent weakness of this approach is that it relies heavily on the effectiveness of the Yahoo! search-engine. Whenever Yahoo! changes the way their search-engine works this is reflected in the number of licences returned by this script. This results in two, as of yet, unexplained phenomena. Firstly the number of licences can vary strongly from day to day. Secondly, it has been observed that Yahoo! seems to sometimes return slightly different numbers depending on the IP-address of the requesting computer. One should therefore realise that a certain margin of error must be assumed when analysing these statistics.