“Googling” Flash

I have to say, this is fairly interesting news. Flash was adopted early by many web-shops wanting to give the user an “integrated media experience” that couldn’t be provided by straight html sites. Since then, the tools have been developed to do site analytics of flash web applications, and flash and the flex framework have come a long way toward optimizing development work-flow. Unfortunately, one of the big things that has been missing is search, or rather search recognition; ironically, many Flash sites are really marketing driven advertising sites, yet their content has not historically been searchable through search engines such as Google. A flash site for “Product XYZ” would likely get less of a ranking on search engines than a blog entry discussing XYZ or a flickr image of someone’s dog named “XYZ.” Looks like Google is looking to level that playing field by now making the move to crawl flash sites as well. Should be interesting to see how this effects search, and where this takes advertising and adwords technologies and the like.