
Show HN: Instant search of 200K+ SVG logos from 100 sources - Fileformat
https://logosear.ch/search.html
======
Fileformat
I often need to find logos and was not impressed by the existing logo search
engines, so, in classic bikeshed mode, I built my own. Because it makes total
sense to try to compete with Google. And Wikipedia. And countless others (some
of which I list on the alternatives page).

Why is mine better?

    
    
      - just logos
      - instant results
      - only SVGs
      - hyperlinked directly to the source
      - no right-click hijacking (or other dark patterns)
      - totally awesome domain name
    

It is open source (AGPLv3), so you can see the tools I use and how it works
(and criticize my code). The sources have their own licenses, so be sure to
check there before using.

It is still a work in progress and there are some glitches (I mean, who would
use a percent sign in a file name? And I'd love to try to fix the Wikipedia
redirected images if I could only find the source...), but I want to see if
people find it useful.

So let me know what you think! And I'm always looking for more sources!

~~~
airstrike
Thanks for building this! I actually obsess about having high quality logos
for companies in the pitchbooks I write, so have built a personal collection
over time... it's not big, but it has the companies I care about.

Some things I thought I'd share from that experience:

* The hardest thing is knowing which logo is actually the most recent and therefore correct. Searching logosear.ch for, say, IBM, yields countless logos that are virtually identical, as well as some of their products (which is fine) but also many old logos like this[0], which I don't think is what your user would want to find 9 out of 10 times (i.e. as a user, if I'm looking for a niche / ancient logo, I don't mind doing the research on my own and understand it will take a while. But when I want "the right logo", I'll consider visiting a specialized logo search engine to get the right result and get it _fast_ )

* In my experience, The best sources for finding the company logo in SVG format are:

\- company website header (hit or miss as SVG adoption at first was slow, but
it's increasingly good for S&P 500 type companies and tech-savvy firms...
anything outside of that venn diagram is pretty bad)

\- Wikipedia page either in English or in the language matching the company's
headquarter (i.e. better luck with German companies in de.wikipedia.org)

\- For large companies where both of the above fail, I search for "company
name filetype:pdf" and look for vector logos embedded into those files, then
use Adobe Acrobat to extract them in a very manual and ugly process by
deleting unnecessary pages / content and cropping, and then visiting
cloudconvert.com to generate a SVG (hey, it works...)

* One final comment is PowerPoint doesn't take SVG files, so I always have to convert them to .emf or .wmf before dropping them in, so maybe you should consider exporting your SVG file in other formats too, though probably not limited to just those two

––––––––––

0\.
[https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:IBM_Logo_1956_1972.s...](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:IBM_Logo_1956_1972.svg)

~~~
Fileformat
Would you be willing to share your collection of high-quality logos with the
community? I can index any github or gitlab repo with logos.

A lot of the current sources are people's personal collections that they have
shared.

This is actually how I started: I made my personal collection into a website
([https://www.vectorlogo.zone/](https://www.vectorlogo.zone/)). My collection
is more curated, definitely in terms of size/layout, and hopefully more
current, but curation is a lot of work, and not what I'm trying to do on
LogoSear.ch.

I do have an SVG to PNG converting working on VLZ. I think there are open SVG
to EMF/WMF libraries, so I could add that as well, but I would need some help
testing it since I'm not a big PowerPoint user. Would you be willing to help?

------
chrisacky
This is so good. I'm currently working on about 100 pages worth of content for
our website and adding attribution+integrations to our partners we work with.
The headache I'm having just Google'ing their SVG logos is about 2-3 minutes
per logo. So about 15 minutes per page just looking for logos. So far, the
last 5-6 I could remember were all included.

What's the source for these images? ie. None of our competitors have their SVG
logos indexed.

~~~
Fileformat
The images all link to their source. The complete list of sources is
[https://logosear.ch/sources/index.html](https://logosear.ch/sources/index.html)

~~~
dankohn1
I'm glad to see you're pulling from the CNCF landscape, where we have 1,400
individual curated SVGs. There are another few thousand across the other Linux
Foundation landscapes referenced at
[https://landscapes.dev/](https://landscapes.dev/).

(Up-to-date list is
[https://github.com/cncf/landscapeapp/blob/master/landscapes....](https://github.com/cncf/landscapeapp/blob/master/landscapes.yml)
.)

~~~
Fileformat
Thanks! I'll add them right away!

------
onion2k
I searched for Twitter -
[https://logosear.ch/search.html?q=twitter](https://logosear.ch/search.html?q=twitter)
Literally none of those are Twitter's actual logo. They're all subtly wrong
(dimensions, color, aspect ratio, etc). In a few cases they're _wildly_ off.
If I can't trust this as a source I'd still have to look up the real one.
Maybe it's less of a problem for smaller companies whose logos won't get
cloned as much, but if I put any of those Twitter logos in a presentation of a
website I don't think I'd impress anyone.

------
cryptoalex
Nicely done!

I've spot-checked few logos that I need at the moment, and most of them are
already there. However, I've noticed that there is no IndieHackers logo in the
database.

I wonder if it is possible to come up with the tool where you would enter the
Home Page Url and the tool would then output an SVG file of round or square
shape that could be used as an SVG icon to represent links to that site (from
my site).

The tool could try to detect the logo image on the home page of the target
site, vectorize and normalize it into square or circle. Or it could try to
locate a Favicon in SVG format, if present. Or, if nothing else works, it
could fall into some default case when the SVG icon would be created from the
most dominant color (of the target site) and 1 or 2 letters of the site name.

Do you guys know of any such tool? Thanks!

~~~
Fileformat
There are a few sites that do this, though none with SVGs. Search for "logo
api" finds ClearBit and RiteKit, among others.

------
impostervt
On a somewhat related topic: is anyone aware of an algorithm that would let
people find related/similar symbols? On the symbology sub-reddit the most
common question is "what is this symbol" and it would be very helpful to
provide a kind of search engine.

~~~
teddyh
Unicode symbol search: [http://shapecatcher.com/](http://shapecatcher.com/)

LaTeX symbol search:
[http://detexify.kirelabs.org/classify.html](http://detexify.kirelabs.org/classify.html)

------
soulchild77
I wrote a Sketch plugin[1] to search and insert SVG logos.

[1] [https://github.com/soulchild/sketch-logo-
fetcher](https://github.com/soulchild/sketch-logo-fetcher)

------
dankohn1
While collecting over a thousand SVGs for
[https://landscape.cncf.io](https://landscape.cncf.io), I found that the SVGs
often needed cropping and other optimization. So (with a colleague) I wrote
and open sourced svg-autocrop, and made it available at
[https://autocrop.cncf.io](https://autocrop.cncf.io).

Try it out for optimizing your SVGs.

~~~
Fileformat
That looks like a super-useful tool! Thanks!

------
gitgud
I wrote this extension to easily copy SVG's with right-click.

[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/svg-2-clipboard/pa...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/svg-2-clipboard/pacmblooebolmbakblffejfmhmnojece)

------
ros86
Wow. That's pretty cool! Bummer that nothing comes up when you search for
logosear.?ch ;-).

~~~
Fileformat
Recursion detected! Stack overflow. Core dumped.

------
medmunds
Nice! I've needed something like this several times.

Two suggestions:

1\. Almost gave up on waiting for it to load... thought the blank white page
meant it was broken or getting the HN-hug-of-death. Maybe add a loading
indicator?

2\. There are "No matches for 'Logosear.ch'"

~~~
Fileformat
I'm hosting on Google Cloud Run, and I turned up the max instances, so this is
a good test. It seems to be handling it okay (though not perfectly) at the
moment...

------
lukevp
This is great, getting logos off sites is so tedious. What about the legality
of using the logos (for example, to use AWS logos for certain purposes, you
have to be a partner). Is that an issue for you to host the logos?

~~~
Fileformat
That's the beauty of a search engine: I'm _not_ hosting the logos. They are
all hot-linked from the original source. Any takedown requests need to be sent
to the source, not to me.

And github, gitlab and wikipedia all allow hotlinking.

The sources (each images is hyperlinked to its source) have their own
licenses: the Wikipedia detail pages go into gory detail. The git repos
hopefully have a LICENSE file.

------
racl101
One neat side use for this is if you want to check if a company name is taken
and how good is their logo.

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codegladiator
Woah nice this works without JS, I wasn't expecting that !

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ChrisMarshallNY
That's pretty useful!

I'm surprised you could get the domain.

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formercoder
Logointern.com works pretty well too

------
kilroy123
Really fast! Nicely done.

