Adobe Helps Search Engines Find Flash Files

Adobe announced that it provided some its Flash technology to Google and Yahoo in order to improve the indexing of SWF files and especially Flex applications. "Although search engines already index static text and links within SWF files, RIAs and dynamic web content have been generally difficult to fully expose to search engines because of their changing states."

To solve this problem, Adobe decided to share Flash Player technology that allows search engines to walk through a SWF file and simulate user interactions. "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," explains Google's Webmaster Blog. The indexing algorithm, which is already live, has some important limitations: it ignores Flash files loaded using JavaScript and it separately handles external resources loaded by Flash files.

I couldn't find too many Flash sites that are fully indexed by Google, probably because we need to wait until Google updates its index.

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