Googlebots crawl for Flash

A RECENT POSTING on the official Googlebog has confirmed that the search giant will soon be indexing Flash content, no doubt to the delight of over-exhuberant web designers everywhere.

Until now, search engine indexing spiders have ignored Flash content much to the annoyance of those enamored by over-designed twirly-whirly animated nonsense.

Ron Adler and Janis Stipins - software engineers on Google's indexing team - explained how the new functionality did its funky thang.

"We've improved our ability to index textual content in SWF files of all kinds. This includes Flash 'gadgets' such as buttons or menus, self-contained Flash websites, and everything in between.

"If your web site contains Flash, the textual content in your Flash files can be used when Google generates a snippet for your web site. 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, Google will also discover URLs which appear in Flash files, and feed them into its crawling pipeline. If a Flash application contains links to pages inside a web site, Google may now discover and crawl more of that site.

Non-contextual content like images and videos are still providing difficult. At present the engineers are only discovering and indexing textual content. Image files will not be recognised or indexed as well as any text that may appear in those images.

The Google boffins have developed an algorithm which explores Flash files in the same way that a person would, by clicking buttons, entering input, and so on. The algorithm remembers all of the text that it encounters along the way, and that content is then available to be indexed.

Google was not prepared to reveal all of the proprietary details, but it did say that the algorithm's effectiveness was improved by utilizing Adobe's new Searchable SWF library.

Webmasters won't have to recode standard content on existing sites as the changes will be implemented automatically, but Flash content which is loaded via Javascript will have to be rethought as the Googlebots won't see it. Offsite flash content will also be indexed seperately.

Lastly, anyone using a bidirectional language, such as Hebrew or Arabic, will have to wait for a forthcoming fix. µ