Flash Files Can Be Googled Too!

Now this should be music to the ears of those who own sites which are flash based. All this while, those who had opted for flash templates for their websites or blogs had no way to make their content searchable using the search engines.



Of course, I had come across a different breed, who were actually proud that their content was immune from all those search spiders crawling the net, indexing whatever they could come across. The reason was that their sites were purely flash based. They felt supreme, their power to hide information from the ubiquitous, the all powerful search bots or spiders; more like “Neo: The One.” (Not all of them were big fans of the movie though)



Come to think of it, it gives me goose bumps. Search engines are getting more powerful as time passes by. They are almost at a point (at least Google is) where you put some piece of information out on the net and they find it (and index it). The naysayers were right after all. There is no such thing as “privacy.”



Enough of me rambling; let me come back to the topic. Adobe is said to be canoodling with Google and Yahoo to make content from flash files/applications available to search engines. I never imagined that files with “.swf” extension will be returned in a search result. Well I guess there is always a time for “first time.”



But there is a catch here. Not all content from a flash file can be made available for search. Images and videos are still out of bounds from those niggly web crawlers. So if the flash files contain images or videos, they will not be recognized by the spiders.



As of today, Google has already implemented this feature with Yahoo set to follow. With regard to other search engines/vendors, Adobe says that it is willing to tie up with them. Also look out for new set of tools from Adobe to help flash site builders to optimize search results, which will be available shortly.



Author