Google and Yahoo are set to Make Flash Searchable
Adobe Systems are teaming up with Google & Yahoo to make content that is mixed with Flash easier for search engines to index. This should have a big impact on how Flash pages/content is sorted & ranked buy those search engines. The great news for sites with existing Flash .SWF files is they won’t need to make any changes to the pages or code, all the work will be done by the spider programmes from Google & Yahoo!
Great! But what does it all mean?
For the end users, it means more relevant search results, according to Justin Everett-Church, senior product manager for Flash at Adobe. “The perfect page for you may have been out there, but it was all Flash content, so it had low search ranking. This will mean it will have a high ranking.”
The problem for search engines finding Flash-based pages is due to the dynamic nature of Flash, and pretty much any Web runtime, said Everett-Church. A HTML file is a flat file with links, while a Flash .SWF file has various states. Based on user interaction, you could go to different parts of the Flash file. When a search spider reaches a HTML page, it goes through the tags but discards SWF file references. With this new indexing method, when it finds an SWF file, it passes the job off to an optimised search program to examine the SWF file’s contents.
“Google has been working hard to improve how we can read and discover SWF files,” said Bill Coughran, senior vice president of engineering at Google, in a statement. “Through our recent collaboration with Adobe, we now help website owners that choose to design sites with Adobe Flash software by indexing this content better. Improving how we crawl dynamic content will ultimately enhance the search experience for our users.”
Google will be going live with the new SWF indexing technology this week, while Yahoo plans to release it at an undetermined point in the future, according to Everett-Church. He expects this change will have a big effect on search results. “There is so much content out there that has been indexed but not to the thoroughness that was possible,” he told InternetNews.com. “It will take a while for Google to spider all the SWFs out there, but as it goes you are going to see a big effect. One is that there will be more search results, and the ones higher up will be the ones with the great experience you’d expect with a Flash app.”
