Google Reads Flash

Posted by Kenneth Ronkowitz on


One reason web designers sometimes avoid developing a site in Flash is because the content they included was not indexable by search engines. They would probably have to do some extra work to present the content in another way that search engines could index. Remember, Flash is used for menus, button, banners and sometimes for entire sites.

Google has been developing a new algorithm for indexing textual content in Flash files. Google recently announced that they have improved the performance of this Flash indexing algorithm by integrating Adobe's Flash Player technology. Now all you web designers can can expect improved visibility and search results for Flash content.

Of course, this does not necessarily address the problems that Flash can sometimes create for people with handicaps that cause accessibility issues. I'm not sure that this new algorithm would help, but I would guess that improved access to text in Flash Player might improve screen reader use. Please comment if you know more about this...

For more tech talk on this, check out the Google Webmaster Central blog about the Searchable SWF integration.

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