Google Improves Flash Indexing
Google announced on the Webmaster Central Blog it made improvements to its flash crawling capabilities. In addition to reading text files inside flash websites, clicking on buttons and following links, it now recognizes external resources in the flash file and associates it with parent SWF file.
Here’s what Google can do with flash (official):
- Index textual content displayed as a user interacts with the file. We click buttons and enter input, just like a user would.
- Discover links within Flash files.
- Load external resources and associate the content with the parent file.
- Support common JavaScript techniques for embedding Flash, such as SWFObject and SWFObject2.
- Index sites scripted with AS1 and AS2, even if the ActionScript is obfuscated. Update on June 19, 2009: We index sites with AS3 as well. The ActionScript version isn’t particularly relevant in our Indexing process, so we support older versions of AS in addition to the latest. – source
Adobe Helping Google and Yahoo, not Microsoft
A year ago in July Adobe shared technology with Google and Yahoo that helps bots interact with flash websites. In a nutshell this technology acts as a user and can click on flash links and read flash embedded text. Google has been improving its capabilities, and so did Yahoo, however Microsoft has been completely left out.
The question that I have, can Microsoft crawl flash? I am sure that it has dedicated assets to develop this type of technology, but how far are they?
Flash crawling is must in the search engine war, especially now that Microsoft has a product which I believe has a long turn shot against Google, at least for few percentage points of the market.
The percentage of flash websites on the internet is small, with HTML/CSS, PHP, ASP and other languages dominating most of the world wide web, however there is a lot of undiscovered content that can be useful to searchers.
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