The
Web would be useless without search engines. But as good as Google and Yahoo
are at finding online information, much on it remains hidden, or difficult to
rank in search results. On Tuesday, however, Adobe took a major step toward opening
up tens of millions of pages to Google and Yahoo. The company has provided the
search engines with a specialized version of its Flash animation player that reveals
information about text and links in Flash files. It’s a move that could be a
boon to advertisers, in particular, who have traditionally had to choose
between building a site that’s aesthetically pleasing and one that can be
ranked in a Web search.
The
new software is required only to index Flash files, not to play them, says
Justin Everett-Church, senior product manager for Adobe Flash Player. Web
surfers don’t need to download a new Flash player, and content providers don’t
have to change the way they write applications. “For end users, they’re going
to see a lot more results and a lot better results,” says Everett-Church. “The
perfect result may have been out there but trapped in a SWF [Shockwave Flash file].
But now they can find it.”
Advertisement
Currently,
Google indexes nearly 71 million Flash files on the Internet (this number can
be acquired by searching “filetype:swf”). These files have, to a limited
degree, always been searchable. Before Adobe’s announcement, search engines
were able to look at a Flash file and extract static text and links from it. But
they couldn’t tell where on the Flash site the text fell–on the main page, for
instance, or deep within the site–which made it difficult to evaluate its
importance. Search engines would also miss moving text inside animations.
This story is only available to subscribers.
Don’t settle for half the story.
Get paywall-free access to technology news for the here and now.
Adobe
gave Google and Yahoo new Flash player technology that works in conjunction
with the “spiders” that search engines use to index Web pages. (Microsoft,
which has developed its own competitor to Flash, called Silverlight, is not
publicly involved in Adobe’s initiative.) Spiders are autonomous programs that browse
through the Web in a systematic fashion. Adobe’s new player allows these
spiders to load Flash files, read the text and links, and click any buttons or
tabs. This allows the spider to make inferences about the context in which a
word or link occurs–something it couldn’t do before.
“Previously,
content providers have had to make a trade-off between using a SWF [pronounced ‘swiff’]
and searchability,” says Everett-Church. But now, he says, Adobe hopes that
more people will feel comfortable developing visually appealing sites without
forgoing search rank.
Analysts
agree that it’s important to make more of the Web searchable, and Adobe’s move
is crucial. However, it’s an intermediate step, says Peter Elst, a Flash
platform consultant. While the move opens up more text and links to search
engines, site designers should have “control over what exactly gets indexed and
how it should be interpreted by a search engine,” Elst says. With conventional
Web pages, designers exert that control by adding metadata and tags that
describe their sites. But, Elst says, that’s not yet possible with the new
Flash tools.
At
this stage, says Elst, many Flash programmers are concerned about how Google
and Yahoo will use their newly acquired information to rank sites. “As far as
we know,” he says, “the data that gets indexed is just a raw dump, and no
context is applied, making it difficult to figure out how you can actually use
this to do search-engine optimization and get higher page ranks.”
Google
has dropped
some hints about how it will handle Flash searches. For instance, its spiders
currently will not load Flash applications that use the language JavaScript, so
those applications may not get indexed. But in the end, people and businesses that
want to promote their websites may need to use trial and error to figure out
how to build Flash sites that search engines will rank highly, adjusting their
tactics as Google’s and Yahoo’s algorithms change. But then that’s what they
had to do with traditional HTML sites anyway.