Adobe's Ichabod and The Headless Search of Flash
While Adobe Flash has remained popular with Web developers who want to deliver fluid user interfaces, database-driven content, and nonstandard typography on the Web, it has suffered from one glaring shortcoming: search engines have been unable to effectively index the content held within the Flash file.
With Ichabod, Adobe is hoping to fix that problem for Flash. Update: According to a comment from Adobe's John Dowdell, Ichabod only works on Flash, not AJAX as previously reported. Nonetheless, it's still a very important step forward.
Earlier this year, Adobe announced that they had begun making progress on the indexing problem with Flash. They also announced that they were teaming up with Google and Yahoo! to help address the issue.
Now, just in time for Halloween, Adobe has unveiled more information about the technology that may resolve the search-engine woes. Code-named Ichabod, it's an early prototype of a "headless Flash player."
The player - which has no user interface - is designed to help search engines index the content held within the confines of Flash by playing the content in a way that allows the search bots to index it.
According to InfoWorld, Ichabod might walk through an interaction so that a search engine bot could index the results:
"The search engine, for example, might find a button in an application; Ichabod will try to push the button and generate an event, which then might lead to an indexing of that content."
Only time will tell if Ichabod's headless Flash player can bring indexing to the sleepy hollows of Flash. But one thing is for sure: With the wealth of content contained within Flash movies throughout the Web it's in everyone's best interests to solve this issue.
For Adobe, it means eliminating one of the last barriers to the continued acceptance of its core Web technology. For Google, Yahoo!, and other search engines, the ability to effectively index Flash content means more relevant search results to which they can affix advertising.
Hopefully, tackling the search engine problem has Adobe's Ichabod meeting with results far more rewarding than those which befell its namesake.
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"Indexing problem with Flash. They also announced that they were teaming up with Google and Yahoo! to help address the issue."
Well i think Flash players enhances page ranking and gives better search results.
@mnvamsi - Flash does nothing for page ranking. Pagerank is based links and content. Searchbots CANNOT read flash content so the page might as well be blank. If anything, flash use is a sign of an amateur who fail to understand basic SEO principles and chooses 'perty graphics' over an actual useful website.
Unfortunately, this new technology means that more people will use Flash for entire websites. Sigh. Makes me want to gouge my eyes out.
@Jonathan Thomas - Pagerank is NOT based on the content of a page. It is purely based on inbound links, anchor text of those links, authority status (and pagerank) of the inbound links, etc.
Pages with 100% flash content can and do have pagerank.
"If anything, flash use is a sign of an amateur who fail to understand basic SEO principles and chooses 'perty graphics' over an actual useful website."
Flash has its place and purpose. Have you ever purchased Adobe products through their website? A very slick ecommerce interface indeed.
Go back to webinarcentral.net that has no PR (not indexed).
It seems there has been some movement on search engine indexing of flash content. Here is an article that says google can index links embedded within flash--
http://www.search-engine-war.co.uk/2008/07/flash-time-to-c.html
Google typically ignores meta tags but that is another sort of thing that could be embedded in flash by the creator and read by the search engine ... if they so desired. I think this issue can be overcome but it will require compromise from the search engines (ok, google and the others will follow their lead). Let's get over it because flash is a very slick interface whose usefulness is hugely degraded by the sole issue of SE optimization.
My site has no pagerank because it was launched Monday. It's currently being indexed... I call it waiting for Goodot.
I was merely disagreeing wit the assertion that you can achieve a good pagerank justbecause you have flash on the site. It doesn't help with pagerank.
Yet, I still think my flash based site got indexed a few months ago by Google. Hopefully ichabod will improve its content indexing...
uh, InfoWorld has since corrected their misquotes in that article.
(From what I understand, Kevin Lynch was running over some recent developments and mentioned Ichabod, the "headless Flash player" which search spiders can use to traverse SWF application state. It'd be similar to making a headless JavaScript engine (which I haven't heard of anyone doing) -- that's my guess of how that one report of the conference got the original headline. Other bloggers ran with the old uncorrected headline today too, so we'll probably have a blogfest of untested echoes....)
Summary: Ichabod is a SWF engine, not a JS engine, sorry. The story is a blogifact.
jd/adobe
"If anything, flash use is a sign of an amateur who fail to understand basic SEO principles and chooses 'perty graphics' over an actual useful website."
Well, that just shows how little u know about RIA and the web in general. Don't criticize something just because u fail to understand it.
@John Dowdell Thanks for taking the time to swing by and comment on this. The article has been corrected.
Thanks, Rick -- appreciate the fast turnaround!! :)
jd/adobe
I understand that this is indeed a great step forward for Flash, but I think there is a long road ahead for full-Flash sites, a road that may never end.
Right now, Flash is perfectly suitable for embedding small interactive objects - especially video and games. This usage is perfect, since no SEO requirements are there (yet).
So there were two big problems with full-Flash websites, which have been recently semi-solved:
1. SEO, now solved by Ichabod, not sure how that will work (microformats anyone?).
2. URL's, full-Flash sites always have one endpoint URL - which can be hacked by using a special # anchor routing (look at Seesmic.com). Unfortunatly this goes against the REST principles the Web is moving to, eg: POST /resource - DELETE /resource
Yes, these hacks work for the moment, but it's swimming against the stream.
Also, Adobe Flash is only 1 technology developed by 1 company (although yes, they might do some Open Source things). Still, a proper Web app is made out of many different technologies, evolved by thousands of people: Javascript Libs, CSS practices, HTML markup and the Microformats that come with it. A lot of development on many fronts!
Therefore, the only place Flash has in this world is an integrated existence. This means that Flash will be most powerful when working with technologies as: Ajax, JSON, Comet, HTML, CSS, etc
The Web naturally dislikes monolithic solutions like Adobe Flex/full-Flash.