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."

Comments

Silverlight

[Anonymous Coward]

Amazing what a little competition will bring...

Re:Silverlight

[The Crooked Elf]

Frankly, though, I'm hoping that, rather than little feature additions like this, they do one of the following: * Make it NOT an absolutely ridiculous memory hog. * Invest some time in making it work with Firefox better (i.e., without the crashes). * Make it work under 64-bit because, frankly, it's really, really stupid that it doesn't. They've had half a decade now; I don't care how poorly written their code-base is.

GREAT!

[the4thdimension]

...now I can search directly for those great flash games I use to pass the time at work! What'll they think of next?

For me...

[dotancohen]

...Flash always crawls. That's life on dialup.

What Adobe should do

[Anonymous Coward]

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".

Re:What Adobe should do

[RangerRick98]

Agreed. I don't see why Flash content needs to be indexed by search engines, because no content worth indexing should be exclusively in Flash.

The only good things Flash has done are games and embedded video. Flash for entire websites is horrible and inaccessible.

Re:What Adobe should do

[Anonymous Coward]

"Flash for entire websites is horrible and inaccessible."

Not true (anymore). As of Flash 9, Adobe got some good accessibility implemented. You can have full keyboard accessibility within a Flash movie by enabling tabbing and setting tab indexes, as well as Section 508 support for screen readers. This was present in Flash 8 as well, but you had to jump through hoops just to enable it so it would work properly. Any flash files that aren't made accessible is due to programmer negligence and/or laziness. I still agree that web sites should be at most a mixture of Flash and regular HTML, but it's not as bad as you say.

Re:What Adobe should do

[Peeteriz]

You don't index the web as it should be, you index the web as it is.
"Flash for entire websites is horrible and inaccessible." - probably yes, but there are such websites in noticeable amounts, so indexing them properly is a good thing. And maybe that will make them more accessible - via a deep link to the content you want, bypassing their flash menus.

That's unfortunate

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:That's unfortunate

[Anonymous Coward]

I hate to break this to you, but I could implement the same thing in Javascript really easily. Or even a Windows app, if I wanted.

Yes, you can do dumb things with other tools if you try to. But, my point is that such dumb things are common and somewhat encouraged by Flash. Plain old HTML provides a basic user interface that works reasonably well. It's not fancy, but it works. If you try hard enough with JavaScript you can muck things up, but things work reasonably well by default; things only go horribly wrong when developers try to move beyond the basics and make bad decisions in the process. Flash gives you a lot more control over the user interface, but without a basic standard starting point for page structure and navigation (as far as I know). So every Flash developer builds his/her own little custom method of navigation, and many lack sensible functionality, worrying more about cuteness instead. Basic things like hitting CTRL-F to search within a page, or being able to bookmark after navigating around get broken.

You're blaming the tool for something that is the fault of the developer who sold this crappy site.

Is it possible to create a decent website in pure Flash? Perhaps. Is it possible to put a screw into a wall with a hammer? Yes, but it's not the best approach. In practice, pure-Flash websites rarely work well, and that's because Flash isn't a good tool for that particular job. Adobe's website isn't pure Flash. That should tell you something.

Here's hoping...

[Tomfrh]

Hopefully it'll crawl under a rock and die.

Something about this makes me uncomfortable...

[Dogtanian]

...matter of fact, it makes my Flash crawl!

Re:This seriously sucks

[Anonymous Coward]

Webmasters? The desire to barf Flash all over a page comes from "online marketing managers" (which I am), executives, people near the top of the pyramid and, by and large, people who just don't get it. These individuals will preface every decision with "when I browse I do", or "people don't want to do X, they want to do Y", often without a shred of evidence and, even more infuriatingly, in direct contradiction of someone who took the time to analyze the data in the first place.

Flash has its place, but it's a very narrow place and this announcement has removed one of my biggest trump cards (re: "no you can't have your retarded dancing monkey on the homepage, it wont bring in visitors and thus we'll lose revenue")

Re:hmmmm

[no1home]

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.