SVG and the Indexing of Web Standards

wombatmobile writes "The world's most popular search engine company is a leading supporter of open standards. It pours money and people into initiatives that promote, assist, support and implement Web standards. As a core foundation of is mission statement, all web assets should ideally be of a kind that it can work with. Strange then, that the world's most popular search engine doesn't index all of the current important Web standards formats. Doug Schepers of W3C blogs about how Scalable Vector Graphics content is recognized and not recognized by search engines, currently and historically." Readability really helps out on this site.

Comments

Standards?

[girlintraining]

This is the great thing about standards: There's so many to choose from!

Severaly flawed stats

[Stan Vassilev]

I don't know why this guy is using filetype Google searches to find out how common SVG and Flash content is.

SVG content makes up just 0.106% of all Web content, by my rough estimation. Flash is almost 5 times as common as SVG. That's pretty grim for SVG. ... But wait, let's put that into perspective. Flash is about 4.8 times more common than SVG. HTML is roughly 838 times more common than SVG. 838 times. Flash content comprises approximately 0.52% of all Web content, and HTML is roughly 189 times more common than Flash.

Let *me* put that into perspective. Most Flash content is deployed via JavaScript, so it won't show in a Google filetype search. None of the sites with Flash I've worked on would pop SWF filetype results in Google. Saying that Flash to SVG are 5 to 1 is hilarious, given the-still-leading browser on the market, IE, supports zero SVG content (to change with IE9 which is in alpha right now).

Saying that Flash is 0.52% of the content of the web is also hilarious. Even just counting the countless embedded YouTube players in blogs would change those numbers drastically.

Re:Severaly flawed stats

[I'm Schepers]

Hi, Stan-

You raise a good point, but I'm not actually talking about the actual amount of content on the web, I'm talking about how it is indexed and searchable (in this case, by Google). I'm sure that there is a lot more Flash content than my rough study indicates, and I could be clearer about that in my blog post, but for the purposes of discussing the relative representation in search results, I think it's fair to say that the presence (or lack of presence) of content is distorted by how easy it is to find it through the search engine.

Ultimately, it doesn't matter how much Flash or SVG content is on the web... both should be indexed and represented in search results. How we get to that point, and how we can make is fruitful for people searching for the content, is the interesting question.

Re:Severaly flawed stats

[Stan Vassilev]

You raise a good point, but I'm not actually talking about the actual amount of content on the web, I'm talking about how it is indexed and searchable (in this case, by Google). I'm sure that there is a lot more Flash content than my rough study indicates, and I could be clearer about that in my blog post, but for the purposes of discussing the relative representation in search results, I think it's fair to say that the presence (or lack of presence) of content is distorted by how easy it is to find it through the search engine.

Ultimately, it doesn't matter how much Flash or SVG content is on the web... both should be indexed and represented in search results. How we get to that point, and how we can make is fruitful for people searching for the content, is the interesting question.

This has been attempted before, which, in the case of Flash, resulted of pages and pages of SERP like these.

It's probably understandable why Google lowered the "rank" of Flash content in their SERP.

Indexing SVG is also of dubious benefits. Flat images may be a nice addition to the images section, if search engines have a good way of recognizing those from SVG-based interactive apps, but that's about it.

However, not all SVG files work outside the page they are embedded in, especially if they depend on related scripts. This is even more so the case with Flash, which often has its data sources loaded externally, based on parameters passed in-page. That's one more reason why people use JS for Flash embedding: it doesn't produce naked SWF files in search results, which rarely works anyway.

Searching is about keywords and phrases, so it works best with HTML, where the majority of text is. Image search is based on the text around the image, and SVG static image search will likely work best that way as well, so there's no pressing need to try to find couple of irrelevant words in a SVG file lost among thousands of vector/color data items.

In other words, indexing Flash/SVG seems to be a solution in search of a problem.

Re:too complicated?

[colinrichardday]

SVG may be complicated for animations/interactivity, but static images aren't that hard to do.

SVGs are the future, imho

[Mabbo]

We *need* to get full support for SVG going. Not as a replacement for flash, or any of that (though really, they could), but just as a basic image format for non-photographic images in computers. Vector graphics scale beautifully, work well with screen magnifiers for the visually impaired, are lightweight, easy to make and edit by hand (it's xml!).

You could implement whole web-apps as a single SVG file if you so desired. That is, if all browsers had full support of SVGs- and as my job this summer is in part to work on WebKit SVG support, let me assure you, nobody is fully compliant yet. But we're getting there. (Damn you Sub-resource loading!)