Yahoo! and Google Search For and Find Flash in a Pan
by
Brett Bumeter
Google and Yahoo! are both turning their search engines on with the ability to search through Adobe’s Flash file content. Websites that are built with flash components or rich internet applications will now yield up their content to Google and Yahoo! for indexing and listing in SERP’s.
“End users will be getting more accurate search results because there’s a lot of information in SWF files that will now be fully indexed, including more information in Rich Internet Applications (RIAs),” said Justin Everett-Church, senior product manager for Adobe Flash Player, Platform BU.
“And content producers are now able to put Flash files online and know that they’re going to bring more users through organic search. The good thing is that they don’t have to do anything to enable this capability it works on any SWF file,” Everett-Church told Macworld. - NYTimes
Flash has historically been criticized for two primary reasons. The first reason is the over use of flash introduction pages that are used by advertisers covering everything from new cars, to consumer electronics to super models popping eca stack pills before getting air brushed within even thinner, longer images. Those intro pages are notoriously ignored and the ’skip intro’ button is one of the popularly pushed buttons on the internet.
However, there is a great deal of flash web content that looks similar to existing web pages, providing useful displays of text and video and navigational buttons that before now search engines literally turned a blind eye towards.
So now that the blind eye has been corrected for search engine vision, it will be interesting to see the shift in search engine results that will take place as Google and Yahoo! attempt to determine if the Flash is really important or whether or not it is a Flash in the pan deserving yet another intro skip.
