Flash Gets Transparent: Google, Yahoo! Learn to Index Flash

By Michael Santo
Editor-in-Chief, RealTechNews

Until now Flash (.SWF) media files have been pretty, well, opaque: search engines couldn’t index them. For webmasters, this meant extra work, as the old adage was “a search engine likes text.” No longer.

In a press release on Tuesday Adobe announced that it was working with both Yahoo! and Google to enable indexing of Flash files. The project will enable searches on Flash content to return text and links, which can then be indexed. Better still, current Flash content will be immediately searchable by search engines, without alteration.

David Wadhwani, general manager and vice president of the Platform Business Unit at Adobe said:

“Until now it has been extremely challenging to search the millions of RIAs (rich Internet applications) and dynamic content on the Web, so we are leading the charge in improving search of content that runs in Adobe Flash Player. We are initially working with Google and Yahoo! to significantly improve search of this rich content on the Web, and we intend to broaden the availability of this capability to benefit all content publishers, developers and end users.”

Of course, all this assumes that the search engine has the Flash tech working: Google is rolling out Flash search today, but Yahoo! said it was going to enable the feature in a later release of its search engine and that it was “working with Adobe to determine the best possible implementation.” And no, Microsoft wasn’t mentioned at all.

However, Adobe’s statement does indicate Adobe will work with other search engines as well. With Microsoft having its Flash competitor, Silverlight, however, I’m wondering if that will slow things down between the two companies.