14 DAY TRIAL // Flash sites are very popular in the advertising and marketing world, but although you end up with a great looking site, you also end up with an "unsearchable" one. Search engines such as Google or Yahoo are unable to crawl flash sites, making it practically invisible to the rest of the world. Adobe has recently announced that it has developed a new technology that will allow flash sites to be indexed and that it is working with Google and Yahoo to implement it.
David Wadhwani, GM and VP of the Platform Business Unit at Adobe comments: "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. 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."
Google web crawlers approach flash pages from a "human" point of view; they click on all the buttons and go over all the content of the site, remembering every piece of text on said site so that it can be indexed. The crawlers do not work on flash sites that have just pictures, movies, music and no text. The reason is quite simple: only text can be indexed.
Up to this point only Google has started to use the new technology. Adobe says it is working closely with Yahoo! in order for it to have .SWF search capability as soon as possible. There is no news from tech giant Microsoft, although Adobe has announced that it ''is also exploring ways to make the technology more broadly available among other search vendors.''
There are of course some who disagree and claim all of this goes against the basic principles on which the web was founded. Adobe representatives replied that 98% of all PCs with Internet access already have Adobe software installed on their system.