Flash Websites Getting Crawled?

After years of wishing, whining and wailing by web developers, Google announced today that it can index "textual content in SWF files of all kinds. This includes Flash 'gadgets' such as buttons or menus, self-contained Flash websites, and everything in between." according to the Official Google Webmaster Central Blog.

In a move that has been long over do and in the wish list for flash based website owners since the 90's, Adobe Systems is teaming up with both Google and Yahoo to make Flash more searchable. Flash developers have been wishing for ways to make their content searchable for close to a decade. Adobe acknowledges this in its announcement, saying that although search engines are able to index static text and links within Flash SWF files, "RIA (Rich Internet Applications) and dynamic Web content have been generally difficult to fully expose to search engines because of their changing states—a problem also inherent in other RIA technologies."

Director of Client Distribution and Business Development in Adobe's Platform Business Unit,
Eric Wittman, said the company is providing optimized Adobe Flash Player technology to Yahoo and Google to enhance search engine indexing of the Flash file format (SWF) and uncover information that is currently non-discoverable by search engines.

The new relationship will provide more relevant search rankings of the millions of dynamic content that run on Adobe Flash Player. In addition, interactive web developers will not need to do anything to make future content searchable, said Justin Everett-Church, Senior Product Manager for Adobe Flash Player. They can be confident that their Flash-based content can now be found by users around the globe, Everett-Church said.

"We've wanted to make an announcement of this impact for several years now," Wittman said. "There are millions of things built in Flash and there have been concerns because of search engine compatibility. We have a piece of technology to remedy this and we’re working with Google and Yahoo. Google has integrated it and Yahoo will in a period of time."

Mark Bold, CEO of Jive3 Media Group that develops RIA and Phoenix Arizona based Interactive Advertising and Marketing studio commented; "We're very excited about this new push for indexing Flash. This allows clients such as ours to harness the power of Flash and be confident that their site no longer just looks cool and engages their visitors, but they can be assured that, more importantly, users can now find their content when searching Yahoo and Google, the two leading search engine companies."

With this announcement, Google can now additionally follow URLs embedded within Flash files to add to the crawling pipeline. This new indexing technology does not include FLV files (video files that are found on sites like YouTube) because those are generated as videos and don't contain any text elements like SWF files do.

What about images in Flash? Google (and eventually Yahoo) won't be able to index everything embedded within a Flash file—at least not yet. Anything that is image related, including the text that is embedded into these images, will be invisible for the time being.

For some reason Microsoft's Live search engine is noticeably missing. Either Microsoft is choosing to sit this one out or perhaps the Microsoft Silverlight platform, a competitor to Adobe Flash, makes Adobe a bit upset, and now its revenge!