Google and Yahoo are now searching Flash
Great news for Flash developers!
Adobe is teaming up with search industry leaders to dramatically improve search results of dynamic web content and rich Internet applications (RIAs). Adobe is providing optimized Adobe Flash Player technology to Google and Yahoo! to enhance search engine indexing of the Flash file format (SWF) and uncover information that is currently undiscoverable by search engines. This will provide more relevant automatic search rankings of the millions of RIAs and other dynamic content that run in Adobe Flash Player. Moving forward, RIA developers and rich web content producers won’t need to amend existing and future content to make it searchable—they can now be confident that it can be found by users around the globe.
Read more about Flash indexing at the Adobe website here: http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flashplayer/articles/swf_searchability.html
Overall this is fantastic news for Flash developers: it really means that Flash is becoming a viable option for websites. Often in website development Flash only gets used as glitter and sparklers to make things look pretty and make buttons look nice; hopefully we’ll start seeing more full Flash websites.
