[Cnet]
Adobe announced late Monday night that it was providing optimized Adobe Flash Player technology to Google and Yahoo to help them better index dynamic Web content and rich Internet applications that include the Shockwave Flash file (SWF) format.
It sounds exciting, but what exactly does it mean for Web searchers, Webmasters, and Flash creators? CNET News.com asked Adobe, Google, and Yahoo and got some answers.
Q: What is Adobe doing?
A: Adobe is providing Google and Yahoo with optimized Adobe Flash Player technology so that their search engine spiders will be able to find and index SWF content, including Flash "gadgets" such as buttons or menus and self-contained Flash Web sites.
Q: How does this work?
A: When a search engine spider hits a normal HTML page and encounters Flash content it will load it in an optimized Flash player on the search engine server. Google has developed an algorithm that explores Flash files in the same way a person would, such as by clicking on buttons and entering input. The algorithm then indexes all the text it encounters through the navigation.
Q: How will the search experience change as a result?
A: The text that people see when they interact with Flash files, such as captions and introductions, will now be used when Google generates a snippet that appears below the URL on the search results page. The words that appear in the Flash files can now be used to match query terms in Google searches. In addition, the URLs that appear in Flash files will be fed into Google's crawling system and be indexed.
Overall, more content will be indexed and search engine result rankings will change to reflect the additional content and its relevance. The snippets will give better information about the page on the search results. You can also expect search engine optimizers to figure out ways to improve rankings of Flash-based Web sites just like they do with HTML-based sites.
Q: Why is this necessary?
A: More than 98 percent of the Internet-connected desktops have Flash Player installed and Flash is hugely popular. Until now, the search engines were able to index some static text and links within SWF files, but much of the content was not getting indexed because of the dynamic aspect of the rich media files. Currently, all that content that was essentially invisible to the search engines will appear in the search results and the small amount of content that gets indexed appears on the search results page in jumbled words and code that are of no use to the Web searcher.
"Now, you are losing all the context of what content was near each other and running at the same time," says Justin Everett-Church, a senior product manager for Adobe Flash Player. He likened the impact to the difference between reading the index of a book and reading the contents of the book.
It sounds exciting, but what exactly does it mean for Web searchers, Webmasters, and Flash creators? CNET News.com asked Adobe, Google, and Yahoo and got some answers.
Q: What is Adobe doing?
A: Adobe is providing Google and Yahoo with optimized Adobe Flash Player technology so that their search engine spiders will be able to find and index SWF content, including Flash "gadgets" such as buttons or menus and self-contained Flash Web sites.
Q: How does this work?
A: When a search engine spider hits a normal HTML page and encounters Flash content it will load it in an optimized Flash player on the search engine server. Google has developed an algorithm that explores Flash files in the same way a person would, such as by clicking on buttons and entering input. The algorithm then indexes all the text it encounters through the navigation.
Q: How will the search experience change as a result?
A: The text that people see when they interact with Flash files, such as captions and introductions, will now be used when Google generates a snippet that appears below the URL on the search results page. The words that appear in the Flash files can now be used to match query terms in Google searches. In addition, the URLs that appear in Flash files will be fed into Google's crawling system and be indexed.
Overall, more content will be indexed and search engine result rankings will change to reflect the additional content and its relevance. The snippets will give better information about the page on the search results. You can also expect search engine optimizers to figure out ways to improve rankings of Flash-based Web sites just like they do with HTML-based sites.
Q: Why is this necessary?
A: More than 98 percent of the Internet-connected desktops have Flash Player installed and Flash is hugely popular. Until now, the search engines were able to index some static text and links within SWF files, but much of the content was not getting indexed because of the dynamic aspect of the rich media files. Currently, all that content that was essentially invisible to the search engines will appear in the search results and the small amount of content that gets indexed appears on the search results page in jumbled words and code that are of no use to the Web searcher.
"Now, you are losing all the context of what content was near each other and running at the same time," says Justin Everett-Church, a senior product manager for Adobe Flash Player. He likened the impact to the difference between reading the index of a book and reading the contents of the book.