Adobe Pairs With Google, Yahoo For Better Flash Searches Results

Flash file format search Google

"Until now it has been extremely challenging to search the millions of RIAs and dynamic content on the Web, so we are leading the charge in improving search of content that runs in Adobe Flash Player," said David Wadhwani, general manager and vice president of the Platform Business Unit at Adobe.

Writing on the Google Webmaster Central Blog, Ron Adler and Janis Stipins, both software engineers on Google's indexing team, answered questions about the changes that the search engine will be implementing to crawl Flash and RIA content. One of the changes involves how Google matches Flash content to a search.

"If your website contains Flash, the textual content in your Flash files can be used when Google generates a snippet for your website. Also, the words that appear in your Flash files can be used to match query terms in Google searches," Adler and Stipins wrote.

Additionally, the change to how the search engine crawls the site will take into account URLs that appear in the content. Those URLs will then be fed into the "crawling pipeline" in order to better index the page for search.

Yahoo search also plans to take an active role in changing the way their search engine crawls sites, according to Sean Suchter, vice president Yahoo Search Technology Engineering.

"Yahoo! is committed to supporting webmaster needs with plans to support searchable SWF and is working with Adobe to determine the best possible implementation," said Suchter.

The good news for people creating Flash content for the Web is that no changes will be required from a content generation standpoint. The changes that are allowing Google and Yahoo to more comprehensively search the Web and provide better results are all being done on their end, not the end user side. "The improvements that we have made do not require any special action on the part of web designers or webmasters. If you have Flash content on your website, we will automatically begin to index it, up to the limits of our current technical ability," said Adler and Stipins on the Google blog.

There are three issues that Google's search is currently encountering with crawling Flash content. The first is JavaScript. If Flash is loaded via a JavaScript, the search may not recognize it. Second, content loaded from external Flash resources will not be considered part of the content. Finally, there are problems searching bidirectional languages such as Hebrew or Arabic.