The world’s leading search engines have taken a major step forward thanks to a special Flash player that Adobe has developed which allows them to read and index SWF files.
Nowadays, there are many Flash elements on the Web, from graphics and video players to ads and even whole websites. Adobe’s new application, which acts like a virtual user, translates the content of SWF files into a language that can be crawled and indexed by search engine spiders.
For now, Google has been the first search engine to develop Flash technology for crawling and indexing SWF files (and can currently find about 73 million Flash files on the Web), while Yahoo! still has work to do in this field. Although this is undoubtedly good news for Flash applications and websites – many ironically created by ad agencies – the fact that they are now visible to search engines does not mean that these sites will be topping many search results.
