Searchable SWF’s – but are we missing the point?
July 2nd, 2008 Posted in FlashA couple of days ago Adobe annouced (as you will probably have seen) they are working with Google and Yahoo! to improve the searchability of Flash…
… all well and good, Im sure many more designers/developers will manage to persuade the marketing department to let them have larger flash conent in their sites.
This got me to thinking however, the majority of flash content appears in hybrid markup/swf pages where linking to the SWF file would actually take you out the context you were interested in searching for in the first place. Not only that it will also potentially bi-pass any embedded arguments that would configure the SWF to work as intended (not a good idea to rely on these of course, but developers do this) – no use at all. So unless the search results for such SWF’s in hybrid contexts will actually link you to the original page context then I cant see much use in indexing them.
Ok fortunately, thanks to the likes of Flex, and more experienced application developers coming into the Flash platform arena we are seeing SWF’s that are the sole container for all the content, so perhaps this is what adobe is intending the search engines to find. Excellent news. Or is it? Surely the true purpose of having such single point of entry SWF files is for RIA’s – what useful textual content are we going to find in here?? Button labels? Webservice URLS? Error messages? – not the sort of content that would help users find your application via a search engine.
So are we missing the point? Personally I dont aspire to a web where all content is Flash. (X)HTML is a perfect vehicle for images and textual information which search engines can easily find. Flash is good for games/animation/advertising/interactivity and in more recent years full on rich internet applications. Maybe, with the advent of Flash Player 10 and the greatly improved text (we’ve heard that before) we’ll begin to see content in Flash thats worth indexing, until then searchable SWF’s is good news, but of very little impact.
