Adobe announced an important development today that will allow search engines crawl and index SWF files. This means text or links contained in Flash files can now be picked up and indexed by Google
and Yahoo crawlers. TechCrunch's Erick Schonfeld notes that this is "a huge step forward" for Adobe and anyone else using Flash because for most people on the Web, if Google and Yahoo cannot find what
they're looking for, it simply doesn't exist.
A new special player now actually translates the runtime of each Flash app into something the search engines can understand, "so all of those
fancy interactive Flash Websites and other rich Internet applications that have been invisible to search engines, can now be seen by them."
As one Adobe exec explains, this invisibility
"has been a big problem for those developing rich applications." After all, who cares how pretty your site is if no one can find it? This is a big win for Flash apps and Web sites, but it's also a big
win for Google and Yahoo, as the move should result in more and better searches.
Read the whole story at TechCrunch »