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Adobe have announced that they team up with search engine industry leaders to improve the quality of search results of Rich Internet Applications (RIA’s).

Adobe is providing optimized Adobe® Flash® Player technology to Google and Yahoo! to enhance search engine indexing of the Flash file format (SWF) and uncover information that is currently undiscoverable by search engines.

Until now Flash technology was unreadable to search engines, therefore websites build with this technology were invisible to the search engines, they didn’t show on high SERP positions, they couldn’t optimize their websites at the same level as HTML websites loosing potential visitors from search engines.

“Until now it has been extremely challenging to search the millions of RIAs and dynamic content on the Web, so we are leading the charge in improving search of content that runs in Adobe Flash Player,” said David Wadhwani, general manager and vice president of the Platform Business Unit at Adobe. “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 new technology lets crawl Flash (SWF) content and no update/reorganization of the website/content is necessary. It’s good news to millions of website owners as they don’t need to worry any more about their website indexation. Simply because their website became visible to search engines (at least Google for a start).

“Google has been working hard to improve how we can read and discover SWF files,” said Bill Coughran, senior vice president of engineering at Google. “Through our recent collaboration with Adobe, we now help Web site owners that choose to design sites with Adobe Flash software by indexing this content better. Improving how we crawl dynamic content will ultimately enhance the search experience for our users.”

Google have already announced Flash indexing algorithm technology and they answer many vital questions about this new Flash algorithm.

Some of more important questions they answer are:

Q: What content can Google better index from these Flash files?
All of the text that users can see as they interact with your Flash file. If your website contains Flash, the textual content in your Flash files can be used when Google generates a snippet for your website. Also, the words that appear in your Flash files can be used to match query terms in Google searches.

In addition to finding and indexing the textual content in Flash files, we’re also discovering URLs that appear in Flash files, and feeding them into our crawling pipeline—just like we do with URLs that appear in non-Flash webpages. For example, if your Flash application contains links to pages inside your website, Google may now be better able to discover and crawl more of your website.

Q: What about non-textual content, such as images?
At present, we are only discovering and indexing textual content in Flash files. If your Flash files only include images, we will not recognize or index any text that may appear in those images. Similarly, we do not generate any anchor text for Flash buttons which target some URL, but which have no associated text.

Also note that we do not index FLV files, such as the videos that play on YouTube, because these files contain no text elements.

It means that Google can crawl and index Flash (SWF) files, read the text inside of them, follow the links, create snippets for a website and associate the words in the Flash file with query terms in Google search engine. That way a website becomes visible to Google.

There are some limitations about Adobe’s new Searchable SWF library. Google can not see images in Flash files, Flash file loaded from JavaScript, content written in bidirectional languages (Hebrew and Arabic language) and Google will index separately any files loaded by the Flash file (such as external HTML file, an XML file or another SWF file).

Yahoo! will also gain ability to index Flash files…but not at the moment. They always seem to be one step behind Google. And this time is no exception.

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.

Adobe Searchable SWF library FAQ: http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flashplayer/articles/swf_searchability.htm l

Google Webmaster Central blog on Flash: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/06/improved-flash-inde xing.html

Official Google Blog: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/06/google-learns-to-crawl-flash.ht ml

Adobe FLash technology: http://www.adobe.com/aboutadobe/pressroom/pressreleases/200806/070108A dobeRichMediaSearch.html