SVG and the Indexing of Web Standards 98
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.
too complicated? (Score:0, Insightful)
i suppose it has nothing to do with the fact that svg is
as complicated as javascript which itself is a more intricate
language than c++.
From TFA... (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
How is that "grim" for SVG? Flash isn't just used for vector graphics and animations anymore....
Re:Severaly flawed stats (Score:3, Insightful)
If they're counting Flash by simply comparing number of SWF files to HTML files, that might be right.
If you were to compare traffic from flash content and compare that to HTML or other web traffic, I think you'd see that a very high percentage of bandwidth is consumed by flash video.
Re:SVGs are the future, imho (Score:3, Insightful)
Not quite the singular purpose. For images that suit line art: ...media size tends to be lower with a vector representation. ...the media remains editable at the line/object level rather than at the pixel level.
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Re:SVGs are the future, imho (Score:3, Insightful)
IE8 and earlier are about 50% of browser use out there. So something approaching 50% of browsers in use support SVG. And those that don't can use plugins.
Flash managed to get accepted purely through the plugin route.
Re:Google and Indexing (Score:2, Insightful)
What information in a SVG would be useful to a searcher?
Think of maps and the text in them for a start.
Re:Severaly flawed stats (Score:4, Insightful)
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 [google.com].
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.