Adobe Makes Flash Searchable - The Holy Grail of Website Usability?
For years the big problem with Flash-based websites is that they could not be properly indexed by search engines. Flash websites have been favored by marketers and advertisers for a long time, because of the ability to create rich, interactive Web experiences. However for most other businesses, particularly those with a lot of information on their website (let's face it, that's everyone except marketers and advertisers), Flash has been nearly an automatic 'no' for website development. That may be about to change.
Adobe announced today that it is teaming up with major search engines - notably Google and Yahoo - to "dramatically improve search results of dynamic Web content and rich Internet applications (RIAs)." In a press statement, Adobe said that it 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."
Adobe claims that it will provide more relevant search results and rankings for RIA content. In a separate blog post, Google announced that it has launched a "Flash indexing algorithm", which will result in better search results.
Adobe admitted in its statement that up till now RIAs have been "generally difficult to fully expose to search engines because of their changing states". In other words, up till now Flash has been mostly invisible to search engines. So this news today will truly be welcomed by web developers and designers. It may even get the approval of ornery old anti-web 2.0 guru Jakob Nielsen!
There's much to admire about Adobe's web technology initiatives over the past year or so. Recent highlights include Adobe AIR (allowing developers to take web applications to the desktop and store data offline), a host of excellent third party AIR apps, an online Office Suite and new Flash-enabled Acrobat 9, a Flash API for Google Maps, publishing the Flash File Format Specs, releasing Flash 10 Beta. And now making Flash searchable.
A little while ago I would've said that browser-based web apps had a big user experience advantage over Rich Internet Apps. But now that they've achieved an (almost) holy grail in searchable Flash, that gap has lessened some more.
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This is terrible, Flash is only good for video and games, anyone making websites that heavily rely on flash need to start thinking about using plain html, css, and javascript to build their websites. It can look as good and is much more universally usable. I understand why Adobe is doing this but we shouldn't be happy about it.
Anyone making websites professionally do use plain html, css, and javascripts. It's just indexable Flash amke another good tool for webmaster, taking into account that "Flash websites have been favored by marketers and advertisers".
i cannot help but think that this move is because of Silverlight. Silverlight aim is also that. no idea if full index capable abilities will be what the final SL.20 could bring. this also marks another line on Adobe and Microsoft against other RIA solutions.
This should be open for anyone to use, not just those two search engines. I was just about to build the next Google killer search engine too...
So, a little more technically speaking, once the user figures out there's information they want inside of a flash file; how are they directed to it? With regular ol' x/html you get urls and anchor tags, but, I don't understand how Google will be able to direct me to the right section (or frame) of the flash file?
Or is this so we can now have AdWords inside of Flash?...It all makes sense now.
I don't think Flash can be indexed as good as html can be because like the user Matt mentioned above , you can actually take a user directly to a url in html but can't do the same in Flash.
Anyway, this should still be considered a good attempt although I would still love to understand how this would actually work.
Matt (5) and Loveguitarncomp (6) - You can already deeply link into a Flash application. Here's an example in blist:
http://app.blist.com/#/blist/asimmons/Top-50-Albums-2007
That's a direct URL to the top 50 albums sold in 2007.
Prior to this Adobe news, search engines would ignore all content to the right of the # sign in the URL, effectively stopping crawling at that point. Presumably Google and Yahoo will learn to recognize that in a Flash application, they need to keep crawling.
I hope this helps clarify.
What a load of steaming marketing rubbish that is overall a bad idea for the web and universal usability.
I'm still of the school that flash should always be kept to a minimum (for businesses). For entertainment and kids websites, go at it - but when you're revenue is dependent on clients finding you via the search engines, stick with xHTML/CSS/Javascript
For Flash sites with rich content this is indeed could be good news, but I'm afraid this announcement will have the greater effect of making the Flash inclined even less SEO intentional than they already are.
Also, getting the text of a Flash movie into the index is good, but since most Flash sites are built as one big movie file, linking to the "page" where the content lives is still impossible.
All and all, with the exception of web applications and maybe movie trailer websites, I still think Flash as a standard website platform is a bad idea.
@Kevin Merritt - Didn't see your comment, thanks for the example of making Flash "pages" linkable. It is possible. But I would still contend that the majority of Flash sites are not as careful as Blist in making their Flash content distinguishable. And now with this announcement they'll just assume that they're okay as far as search goes and stick with their poorly implemented, content weak Flash sites.
It looks like one of my reasons to stay away from Flash is about to fly away.
Wow I can't imagine how much misinterpretation of that by SEO and Marketing people I'm gonna hear in the next few weeks with that kind of news...
SWEET as a company that deals with search engines I am loving this post. I will def be keeping an eye on this.
The important point to remember here is that the initial search capabilities will be limited for existing flash sites and pages containing flash. In many cases the searchability of flash will depend a lot on the developer and the mechanisms they use to display data. Right now developers use flashvars or dynamic data to change frames or scenes to show different content. I am unclear how Google plans on linking directly to a frame or scene in a swf on a page.
I will believe the capability when I see it in action. I'm not holding my breath.
Google has been saying for a while that it can index flash sites. So this is a step forward - however, deep linking is still unavailable - as well as back button in the broswer. Most important of all - for SEO - Analytics will not be able to track pages like it does with HTML sites. If you want to see a solution to this, visit my Flash site at
http://www.davincimediaworks.com
It enables the back button, allows deep linking from search engines, allows pages to be book marked, and you can track each separate flash page with Analytics.
nice PR release.
but i won't be holding my breath on this one.
to only supply the working model to 2 search engines goes to show how unscalable the solution is or how much work is really involved in trying to get this to work.
Seems like a discreet way for the SEO folks to spam the search engines. Just what I need...Even more irrelevant results.
I see plenty of businesses using Flash now.
You can put any description and keywords in the meta tags of a page that a Flash file resides on.
Adobe is the King.
>A little while ago I would've said that browser-based web apps had a big user experience advantage over Rich Internet Apps
This surprises me, for two reasons:
1) RIA is often considered to offer a better UX - see the Forrester "smackdown" article of HTML vs RIA. The visual feedback on user action as well as the progressive presentation of content is often seen as offering a better experience.
2) indexing content doesn't enhance the user experience in and of itself (unless the experience you're considering is that of someone using a search engine). So this new advancement shouldn't really the perception of RIA from a UX perspective.
I'm an accessibility person myself, so I read the announcement with mixed feelings. I do see this as a potential problem, where people will cease to consider non-flash-based visitors and continue to shut people out.
Flash should be used for embedding audio/video and that's all. JavaScript seems to be the wave of the future and Flash is just trying to catch up. Even though Adobe is trying to enable indexing of flash content it seems like what they are doing is too little too late. Especially with the JavaScript library's that have surfaced in the past few years.
And, if Yahoo and Google are the only ones teaming with Adobe it seems like the whole project will fall through after a couple of years.
You're right, Michael and Johan De Silva. We shouldn't be happy about anything that benefits the user. *rolls eyes*