Adobe Makes Flash Crawlable

nickull wrote in his journal that "Today Adobe systems made an announcement that it has provided technology and information to Google and Yahoo! to help the two search engine rivals index Shockwave Flash (SWF) file formats. According to the company, this will provide more relevant search rankings of the millions pieces of Flash content. Until now, developers had to implement workarounds for exposing text content used in Flash to search-engine spiders and other bots such as using XHTML data providers. While the Flash content is exposed, it is not yet clear how it will be utilized by the search engines, as they have not revealed their algorithms. The SWF specification is openly published."

Re:Great!

[Bogtha]

Now all they have to do is make it so, when you make a web site in Flash, you can link directly to the "page" you want.

That has been possible for years. Possibly ever since the first version, I'm not sure. You use a fragment identifier in the link and check it to find out which "page" to display.

There's enough wrong with Flash that misrepresenting it is unnecessary and only serves to discredit you in the eyes of people who know better.

Re:What Adobe should do

[Anonymous Coward]

"Flash for entire websites is horrible and inaccessible."

Not true (anymore). As of Flash 9, Adobe got some good accessibility implemented. You can have full keyboard accessibility within a Flash movie by enabling tabbing and setting tab indexes, as well as Section 508 support for screen readers. This was present in Flash 8 as well, but you had to jump through hoops just to enable it so it would work properly. Any flash files that aren't made accessible is due to programmer negligence and/or laziness. I still agree that web sites should be at most a mixture of Flash and regular HTML, but it's not as bad as you say.

Re:Flash

[Richard_at_work]

For a start, "crawlable" does not mean it WILL be crawled.

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/06/improved-flash-indexing.html [blogspot.com]

Re:Great!

[heinzkunz]

> Now all they have to do is make it so, when you make a web site in Flash, you can link directly to the "page" you want.

Flex Builder 3 has support for deep links (they were possible before, but now it's in the framework), so a link from a search result directly to the searched item should be possible.

You may want to take a closer look at why Flash is slow for you. The player is really fast. It's a decent virtual machine and graphics engine. If you have a flash 9 plugin, take a look at this page: http://papervision3d.org/ [papervision3d.org] It's a 3d engine with texturing support that's usable on a current computer. It is impossible to touch that performance using a web browser without plugins. Flash is only slow if it's used in a stupid way (playing multiple video ads on a page) or programmed for by incompetent people (hobby coders, designers).

I believe that Flash is a good platform, but as long as a single company can run it all into the ground, we can't rely on it. What is really missing is an open source flash player (Gnash is not good enough, I want Adobe to open up the player).

Re:A Good Thing

[biovoid]

RTFA - Adobe has provided a version of the Flash Player that allows search engines to crawl dynamically loaded content. That's the whole point of the article. Google has been indexing static SWF content for years - this is all about dynamic content.

Re:Silverlight

[IntlHarvester]

"Image PDFs" are required for certain workflows. The people who need them could care less if irrelevant poster #1001089 thinks they're horrible or not.

And they actually have a have a text layer for OCR or searchabity which Google understands.