Adobe is teaming up with Google and Yahoo! to improve indexing of dynamic content in rich internet applications made with Flash. This means Google and Yahoo! will be able to crawl your site if you have a Flash/Flex/OpenLaszlo based application that pulls content from database.
Here are some excerpts from the press release.
Adobe is providing optimized Adobe® Flash® Player technology to Google and Yahoo! to enhance search engine indexing of the Flash file format (SWF) and uncover information that is currently undiscoverable by search engines. This will provide more relevant automatic search rankings of the millions of RIAs and other dynamic content that run in Adobe Flash Player. Moving forward, RIA developers and rich Web content producers won’t need to amend existing and future content to make it searchable — they can now be confident it can be found by users around the globe.
Google has already begun to roll out Adobe Flash Player technology incorporated into its search engine.
Yahoo! also expects to deliver improved Web search capabilities for SWF applications in a future update to Yahoo! Search.
This surely is a great development!
Update:
OpenLaszlo blog has a great post on why this is not so big a news!
Yea, but dude, everyone is using swfobject to invoke their swf movies. that is why swfobject is the norm now b/c of the whole MSFT “click-to-activate”. flash developers have been getting around the indexing for 5 years now. use faust.
@Mark: Thanks for the comments. Though I don’t think faust solves the full problem. It gives full control to the developer though. And people have used a lot of similar techniques so that bots index their content.
For anyone who wants to know more about faust, check out space150’s blog post on it.
This still doesn’t help anything. Almost all Flash apps are embedded on the page with SwfObject. SwfObject uses javascript. Javascript is ignored by search engines and your flash will not show up.
Here is a quote from Google:
“So if your web page loads a Flash file via JavaScript, Google may not be aware of that Flash file, in which case it will not be indexed.”
Nirav,
This is definitely an excellent enhancement to the most valuable google search engine.
I just hope we don’t get lot of additional unwanted flash websites in the google search results, when we are searching for something, which may make it hard for someone to find what they are looking for.
Ramesh
The Geek Stuff