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Adobe Makes Flash Crawlable
nickull wrote in his journal that "Today Adobe systems made an announcement that it has provided technology and information to Google and Yahoo! to help the two search engine rivals index Shockwave Flash (SWF) file formats. According to the company, this will provide more relevant search rankings of the millions pieces of Flash content. Until now, developers had to implement workarounds for exposing text content used in Flash to search-engine spiders and other bots such as using XHTML data providers. While the Flash content is exposed, it is not yet clear how it will be utilized by the search engines, as they have not revealed their algorithms. The SWF specification is openly published."
Amazing what a little competition will bring...
...now I can search directly for those great flash games I use to pass the time at work! What'll they think of next?
Crackin' Wise - Blogging about whatever we want
...Flash always crawls. That's life on dialup.
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
Instead of (or in addition to) giving search engines information on Flash, Adobe should tell Flash users when not to use it. Avoid putting large texts in a Flash application and not offering the same in HTML. This is pretty obvious to everyone with half a brain, but "web developers" often seem to "forget".
Now we'll get black hat SEOs keyword stuffing flash files and adding flash widgets all over the place. /me never enabled flashblock before, but he might soon.
I'd be much happier if the search engines quit linking to flash-only websites completely. Then maybe those horrible things would go away.
I can't think of any case where I've seen a Flash-only site where Flash added anything of substance (cuteness doesn't count), and they tend to be hard and non-standard to navigate, break key bindings (like CTRL-T to open a new tab doesn't work if mouse is over Flash), etc.
Here is an example: A business association's website was redesigned in Flash. Instead of their staff page having a simple list of photos, names, job titles and phone numbers that you could search by hitting CTRL-F, the flash version just shows a photo of all of the staff members and you can only find the job titles and contact info by holding the mouse over the appropriate person's photo. So, if you want to find the contact info for the newsletter producer and you don't already know what he/she looks like, you have to move your mouse over each of 15 different photos until you find the right one. Stupid. There is just too much dumb stuff going on with Flash.
Hopefully it'll crawl under a rock and die.
...matter of fact, it makes my Flash crawl!
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Now all they have to do is make it so, when you make a web site in Flash, you can link directly to the "page" you want. And make the Flash plugin fast. And make it not crash so often. Oh and then, finally, come up with a real reason as to why we should use Flash instead of something else.
Once they do that, it'll be a great little format.
The fact that search engines couldn't index Flash was a strong argument against its use for textual content. With that excuse gone, more webmasters might consider using it.
Only problem is, Flash for textual content is HORRIBLE. Totally ruins the consistent experience I want with my web browser. Flash text does not behave like HTML text in several ways.
I really hope this doesn't encourage more Flash content from point-n-drool webmasters ...
For a start, "crawlable" does not mean it WILL be crawled. More likely, most flash will contain nothing but junk and internals that were never meant to be seen anyway. I wonder when the first "we recovered a password that was stored inside a flash file" / "we googled for vulnerable flash apps and found these" hits will come about. And, as someone's already pointed out, if you *can* extract the text from them, you can't do much useful with it besides say "it's in this Flash somewhere". You can't even do "find in page" once you've clicked on such a link. And if it's at the end of an hour-long Flash animation, you're not going to sit through it.
Then you'll have some people who have actually used bitmaps instead of text inside the Flash for various reasons, etc. The only useful thing to come out of this may well be a "View as HTML" version of Flash-only pages. But they will still be second-class pages because the designer didn't want to do it theirselves.
Given that people who use Flash aren't exactly the most popular people in the world (e.g. if you want it to appear in Google, be read by people, to be bookmarked, to be quoted/cited/linked etc.), this won't affect much - Finding content in a Flash file is like looking for a needle in a haystack. That's the problem solved by this announcement. However, finding *useful* content in that file is going to be even worse, and actually getting users TO that data will be almost impossible.
I imagine that the same thing will happen as it did with images, PDF's, etc. Those who design their Flash well will get something indexed and it'll actually get a hit or two from "View HTML Version" on Google. Those who don't (i.e. 99% of the people who make them) won't see any difference at all.
Why would I want search engines crawling through my thumb-drive?
OK, before you mod me troll, that was a joke.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
... who read the title as "Adobe Makes Flesh Crawl"? My first thought was, yeah, so what else is new?
I dream of a better world... one in which chickens can cross roads without their motives being questioned.
Lack of indexing may have been one of the only things holding back the total Flashification of the Web.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Actually, if web programmers would adopt and adhere to some 'best practices', flash, applets, and the like would be less of a problem. What they should include on each of their web pages is a way to toggle each movie and each sound, with the default being to not play until told to do so. I shouldn't need No Script to stop the wailing of a page.
And along the lines of what Google-Yahoo-Adobe are trying to achieve here, they should make it so we can right click on any of the links and get my usual menu options: open link in new window; in new tab; in IE tab (for those who use this); copy link location; bookmark; etc. Then it would be much more integrated into the web experience and we'd all be (at least a little) more comfortable with it.
I hope this comment is well received... I could have moderated instead!
Persecutors will be violated!