Usability News: Adobe Makes Flash Searchable

Submitted by Makakman on Tue, 01/07/2008 - 12:40.

Great news from Adobe is that they are making Flash searchable and have teamed up with Google and Yahoo to make this possible according to ReadWriteWeb.

“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.

The main problem with Flash sites are that search engines cannot crawl them for information to determine exactly what they hold. If they can't be crawled, they can't be ranked which means no search engine traffic no matter how good the content.

Adobe Flash Player is now installed on 98% of machines so this development might see Flash appearing on more sites in the near future.

This is good news although we wait and see exactly how this turns out.

Update

Well that lasted about as long as you'd expect!! Tim Nash explains.

Makakman's blog

Well what did you expect

Submitted by Tim Nash on Tue, 01/07/2008 - 21:03.

Well what did you expect from me?
On a serious note I really wanted when I saw the announcement this morning to be something big, and by big I mean a real change in philosophy away from "we must not make flash/flex developers change their habits" to here are some of the mechanisms to help rank (note rank not index) flash files its up to you how to implement them in your project. Instead they just rehashed old technology and stuck a new front end on it to eek out a tiny bit more content most of which they could already extract but until they provide the structure to help rank it what is the point?

Always on the Ball!

Submitted by Makakman on Wed, 02/07/2008 - 08:44.

Cheers Tim for the comment, always quick off the mark as usual. As you've confirmed the changes weren't as thorough as I'd hoped so those webdevs with pure flash sites will have to wait a little longer!

I look forward to the next Adobe press release about search with some scepticism!