This paper proposes a new search strategy using mutative scale chaos optimization algorithm (MSCO) for model selection of support vector machine (SVM). It searches the parameter space of SVM with a very high efficiency and finds the optimum parameter setting for a practical classification problem with very low time cost. To demonstrate the performance of the proposed method it is applied to model selection of SVM in ultrasonic flaw classification and compared with grid search for model selection. Experimental results show that MSCO is a very powerful tool for model selection of SVM, and outperforms grid search in search speed and precision in ultrasonic flaw classification.