Richard Strucke

FLASH (SWF) content finally searchable?

It feels as though half my life has passed to final see the day when dynamic flash content, wrapped in SWF’s, can be crawled and indexed by Google and Yahoo! search spiders. In short, SWF searchability is finally here. Alas, the day has come, and I once again have a renewed interest in Flash.

Adobe’s has produced a FAQ document on their new initiative to help search engines index the dynamic content of SWF’s. While they don’t go into detail, Adobe explains..

Google uses the Adobe Flash Player technology to run SWF content for their search engines to crawl and provide the logic that chooses how to walk through a SWF. All of the extracted information is indexed for relevance according to Google and Yahoo!’s algorithms. The end result is SWF content adding to the searchable information of the web page that hosts the SWF content, thus giving users more information from the web to search through.

According to the FAQ, Google has already begun to roll out the Adobe Flash Player technology and should begin showing up in search results. Yahoo is still determining the best way to implement the technology.

I was most impressed with the fact that the technology is backward compatible to previously created SWF’s and Flex derived RIA’s. This is a huge savings to long time developers of flash and their clients.

However, it also raises the question — if it’s so (seemingly easy to be) backward compatible, why did it take this long? Did it take the powerhouse prowess of Adobe to push for this to become reality or even though this is a long debated downfall of developing in Flash, is this a Macromedia initiative finally coming to fruition? I’m sure we’ll get the scoop on that sooner or later.

At any rate, this is good news in Flash land. I can’t wait to start testing on my own and looking to the SEO’s who undoubtedly already have to find the limits and come up with best practises for SEO within SWF’s. More on this later, I’m off to poke around and see what results I can (and cannot) get back from Google.