Stephen Downes

You can access the CC Image search directly using this web site. Type in 'Gamboa' and you'll see my photo of a crocodile (from about three feet away, in the wild). What they are releasing here is an Application Programming Interface (API), that is, a tool that lets developers build an interface directly to the search from within their application. So (for example) a person writing an MS-Word plugin could use this API to make the images directly accessible within word. Lovely. And if you're wondering, there are  330 million and counting openly licensed images.