Search Indices Get Flashy

Written by Ryan Lawler

Tuesday, July 1. 2008 at 10:20 AM EDT 5 comments

Digg   Del.icio.us   Reddit   Email This

• Login to Rate

In an effort to provide better search results for Websites that include rich media, Adobe Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: ADBE) has partnered up with Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) and Yahoo Inc. (Nasdaq: YHOO) to enable those companies to index Websites based on content found in Flash files.

As part of the partnership, Adobe has provided Google and Yahoo with an optimized version of its Flash player that allows them to crawl Adobe .SWF files and index material that was previously not viewable by their search engines.

According to Justin Everett-Church, senior product manager for Adobe Flash Player, the partnership will provide better search results for pages based on Flash. Previously, "because all the info was inside a Flash file, a page might have been lower down in the rankings or may not have been indexed at all."

The partnerships will enable the "experience that Flash brings without having to make the tradeoff of searchablility," Everett-Church says. Web developers "can now have all the creative experiences of Flash but also have customers find them organically."

Google is already in the process of rolling out Flash indexing, but Yahoo is a little behind. "Yahoo is committed to doing this but they are not quite there yet," Everett-Church says.

While the search engine optimization (SEO) community will be better able to target search engines that use Flash technology, those that have already created Websites based on Flash need not worry about remaking them. Because Adobe's technology is backwards-compatible, the search engines will be able to index any Flash content made over the last 12 years.