Adobe gives Google, Yahoo better Flash search technology

Stephen Withers
Wednesday, 02 July 2008 03:19

Your IT - Home IT

Adobe is providing Google and Yahoo! with technology that allows search engines to index Flash content more effectively. The trick is that rather than simply detecting static text and links within SWF files as they do now, search engines gain a way of 'seeing' the various states of a piece of Flash content.

Google has already incorporated Adobe's technology into its own Flash search algorithm. According to Google's Webmaster Central Blog, everything from Flash buttons and menus to complete Flash sites is now indexed.

While Google's Flash spidering mechanism explores user interface elements such as buttons to reveal text that a human user would encounter, there are some limitations that web designers should be aware of.

In particular, the Googlebot does not execute some types of JavaScript, so it is possible to load a Flash file in such a way that Google does not notice its existence.

Another is that external resources loaded by Flash content are not considered part of that content but are indexed separately.

Google also warns that text in bidirectional languages (Hebrew and Arabic) is not currently indexed from Flash files.

Yahoo! will follow suit but "is working with Adobe to determine the best possible implementation," according to Sean Suchter, vice president Yahoo! search technology engineering.

And there's more to come - see page 2.