Adobe Opens Flash To Search Engines, Finally

San Jose (CA) - There may be one more reason to create Internet content in Flash soon: Adobe said that it is working with Google and Yahoo to enable crawlers to index content currently trapped in proprietary SWF files. The collaboration is expected to result in a much more relevant search ranking of Flash content and help those sites that are betting on Flash to enhance the usability of their site.

Despite continued advances in search engine technology, millions of web applications and rich content created with by the popular Adobe Flash technology contain potentially valuable information that, however, is locked away from spiders that index web sites. Spiders that collect and index web pages are mostly constrained to plain text contained in HTML code and text documents, but have been extended over time to rich-format file types such as PDF. More complex rich media such as video files can only be properly indexed and searched, if they are combined with so-called meta data, which is additional information about the file and its content provided by the content creator.

Adobe Flash presentations are particularly difficult to index since they are encoded in the SWF format, a proprietary file type once created by Macromedia, which was acquired by Adobe more than two years ago. SWF is a vector-based, size-optimized file format, making it difficult to extract meaningful information. At this time, search engines can capture only hyperlinks and static text within SWF files due to the dynamic nature of SWF programs that can change their appearance and displayed content.

The collaboration between Adobe, Google and Yahoo is significant as users can now expect Flash content to become searchable and receive and more prominent ranking in search results. Adobe said it is currently working closely with both Google and Yahoo to enable Flash indexing. While there has been no specific information if Flash indexing will be offered to other search engines as well, Adobe is widely believed to broaden its effort to include Windows Live Search and smaller search engines such as AOL Search and Ask as well.