[mthoms]

Yotophoto.com

Was the web's first search engine for libre (free to use) images, mostly Creative Commons and Public Domain. One of the things I'm most proud of was a "search by color" feature that was very fast, accurate and way ahead of what anyone else was doing at the time (IMHO).

Yotophoto was doing a million searches (~100k unique) per day at one point.

[akadruid]

I did the exact same thing at reusableimages.com a few years back, but gave up due to lack of traffic and a growing sense of being out of my league. The site just uses Yahoo image search now.

[dholowiski]

How come you killed it? I'm guessing it's because it was tough to monetize?

[mthoms]

It wasn't necessarily difficult to monetize (mostly via ads for Microstock imagery sites). But it was quite difficult to scale the technology. I made great progress optimizing the crawler and search tech but eventually lost interest.

Google and Flickr also added Creative Commons image search options eventually.