The other day there was a substantial announcement that Google in conjunction with Adobe would be able to crawl and index Flash content. The engines have been working on this for quite some time now so we can expect the other major engines to follow shortly.
Over at the official Yahoo blog, there has been some discussion in the comments of recent posts about Yahoo being able to crawl and index Flash. In the Adobe press release it said Yahoo (YHOO) is working on it for release at a future date. David Wadhwani, GM and VP of the Platform Business Unit at Adobe stated: “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.” The press release goes on to state that
Yahoo! also expects to deliver improved Web search capabilities for SWF applications in a future update to Yahoo! Search. “Yahoo! is committed to supporting webmaster needs with plans to support searchable SWF and is working with Adobe to determine the best possible implementation,” said Sean Suchter, vice president Yahoo! Search Technology Engineering.
As long as the most relevant results are presented on the search engine results pages, the indexing of Flash content should be a positive thing for many Webmasters and site owners. Yahoo being able to index Flash should affect the search results, but I suspect that Flash pages will not dominate the results unless they happen to be the most relevant page for the desired search query. We will have to await for a formal announcement from Yahoo which we can expect in upcoming weeks or possibly days.
Labels: Yahoo indexing Flash
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It's about time! Otherwise, they'll be left behind by Google. Now, I wonder when MSN will follow suit.