Search engines look to improve Flash indexing

01/07/2008

Web designers could soon be able to see more of their dynamic content appear in search engine listings following recent developments.

Adobe, owner of the Flash SWF file format and related technology, has announced that it is partnering with Google and Yahoo! to make Flash content - including whole web pages and rich internet applications - more visible to search engines.

The company has provided the two search firms with its Flash Player technology to help them to better index dynamic content across the web.

"We are initially working with Google and Yahoo! to significantly improve search of this rich content on the web and we intend to broaden the availability of this capability to benefit all content publishers, developers and end users," explained David Wadhwani, general manager and vice president of Adobe's platform business unit.

Google has already started to include more Flash content in its listings after developing an algorithm that looks at banners, menus, buttons and other objects for searchable text, company software engineers Ron Adler and Janis Stipins announced on the Official Google Blog.

Yahoo!, meanwhile, will follow in Google's footsteps after it makes an update to its own search engine shortly.