DIGG IT! Tonight Adobe is announcing a collaboration with Google and Yahoo! to enhance the searchability of SWF content by helping their spiders playback SWFs in the Flash Player runtime. The project runs SWF files within web spiders and allows all contents within a SWF file to be read by both major search engines. The cool part is that this also covers dynamic data loaded in from requests to a server, these are typically ignored in both AJAX and SWF applications.
The net result is that SWF as a file format is now fully searchable by spiders at Google and Yahoo!. This is a very exciting announcement and is sure to be the talk of the town all day tomorrow.
Go SWF, Go Flash Player!
Ted :)
This is big time.
ping back from samiqbits
[So the news just broke, Adobe will be providing Google and Yahoo with a special Flash player that is optimized to look over the content of your SWF's and crawl its content as if you were the one clicking buttons and navigating within.]
I'll raise you to "Go Adobe!!". It seems like every time I load up my browser they have another fantastic/positive announcement to make!
Cheers,
Simon
Another important milestone achieved!!
I still believe that the XSLT - XML way is far better (directory.onflex.org). What do you think?
This is a great breakthrough.
Great work !!
Gerdt
Dutch flex user group
I realize this is a huge step, but you make it appear to be complete when it seems to have a fair amount of work left to be done, especially in regards to the dynamic data you mentioned.
View #2 on the following page: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/06/improved-flash-indexing.html
Does this mean when someone searches for "anything" at google they don't have to also add "filetype:swf" to their text? if not then this means nothing. no one i know adds "filetype:swf" to their search let alone knows what that means...
I have a VERY important question!
How will a spider navigate around a SWF when there is very limited symantics in ActionScript / MXML to define what the equivalent of an HTML anchor tag is?
The second question is now will Google then link a use back into a page when very few flash sites provide deep linking?
Unless there is an answer to these questions I see this as more or less pointless...
i don't believe this is going to work or has real potential - simple swf indexing with text extraction or links from buttons are so early 2000.. these days- rich content sites are much more complex and the content is parsed from external files.
and there's the end of road- even indexing core xml doesn't make any good since it doesn't point to the state of site/application with relevant content. also- most flash sites doesn't have deeplinking integrated at all.
so the only solution i see for search indexing - google should work on flashmap.xml - similar concept to sitemaps. this should push site developers to provide content for indexing. and even enable to create/develop deeplink urls.
google then should use their swf crawlers just to protect from spam by trying to verify if real flash site and content/keywords in flashmap.xml are similar.
The key is that this enables deep exploration of RIA content both static and dynamic to occur. It will take time to see how it gets implemented in each spider but SEO enabling SWF content is no longer a hard "it can't happen" barrier.
Also there is a parallel to the work completed around Accessibility. Screen readers are a type of local spider and enabling things for compliance (labelling states and buttons) will enable spiders to better locate what things are within a SWF file. Plus it will make your Flash based content more accessable at the same time, Win Win!
Ted :)
Hi Ted,
Does this imply additional performance considerations for the server side of our applications?
Cheers,
Chris
I am very interested in testing these plugin. I would be more than happy to provide feedback. I have a little mini project in mind for Cairngorm, so this would suit my needs perfectly.
Yes! Yes, yes, yes!!!
This is a very exciting announcement,. Searchable SWF (:
This is a great work !!