Flash gets searchable, widening use

Adobe’s Flash technology provides a “flashy” user interface for Web sites, set-top boxes, cell phone and video content but with one important caveat – unlike HTML, Flash content was not able to be spidered and indexed by search engines.

But that’s changing, thanks to work Adobe has underway with Google and Yahoo to enhance the search-engine indexing of the Flash file format (SWF), Adobe said today.

Google said it has already launched a new Flash indexing algorithm. The new capabilities, announced on the official Google blog, mean that content owners no longer have to choose between making their content good-looking versus making it indexable. Yahoo said it expects to launch similar capabilities in the next release of its search engine.

Flash content is not only a major element in many Web site designs, it is used by advertisers to build Web banners and by many video providers as the format for downloadable and streaming Web video, including Google-owned YouTube. In addition, Flash has emerged as a major enabling technology on cell phones and is used by many set-top box makers to build screens and interfaces for interactive TV offerings.

The new Flash indexing algorithm in Google means that elements of Flash-delivered sites will begin showing up in Google search results, with snippets of descriptive content that can also be pulled from the Flash content itself.

Google engineers described how the algorithm works in a blog posting on the Google Webmaster blog: “We've developed an algorithm that explores Flash files in the same way that a person would: by clicking buttons, entering input and so on. Our algorithm remembers all of the text that it encounters along the way, and that content is then available to be indexed,” the engineers wrote.

Flash competes with Microsoft’s Silverlight and more Web-native technologies like AJAX to provide the more interactive, video-like interfaces for next-generation content.