14 DAY TRIAL // Google has announced that it has started indexing SVG files. Scalable Vector Graphics is an open standard format for vector images, both static and dynamic. It has been associated with HTML5 and is sometimes preferred for animations, but support for it hasn't been great so far.
Now the Google crawler will look inside SVG files, just like it does for Flash and other content, and index the text they may contain.
Google has just started doing this so it hasn't gotten around to indexing that many SVG files yet.
"You can now use Google search to find SVG documents. SVG is an open, XML-based format for vector graphics with support for interactive elements," Bogdan Stanescu and John Sarapata, Software Engineers at Google, wrote.
"We’re big fans of open standards, and our mission is to organize the world’s information, so indexing SVG is a natural step. We index SVG content whether it is in a standalone file or embedded directly in HTML," they added.
"The web is big, so it may take some time before we crawl and index most SVG files, but as of today you may start seeing them in your search results," they explained.
SVG hasn't exactly taken the web by storm, but this is also due to lackluster support from web browsers, Internet Explorer in particular. Still, the format holds potential so it's good to see Google add it to the list of file types indexed by the search engine.
Since there aren't that many SVG files indexed so far, Google lists a couple of examples of the feature in action, "sitemap site:fastsvg.com" or "HideShow site:svg-whiz.com."
Still, there is some work to be done yet. For example, Google doesn't follow links in SVG files, leading to some mild criticism of the implementation.