IVT News

Google and Flash become friends
Thu, Jul 17 2008

By Jonathan Oxer, IVT Technical Director The web was originally designed as a text-only medium: it didn't even have images, let alone all the embedded multimedia such as video and audio that we see today. I remember being excited when a new version of the Mosaic browser came out in December 1993 with the ability to display images in web pages, because prior to that a web page could reference an image but it couldn't actually be displayed as part of the page itself: the browser had to download it separately so it could be viewed on your computer using an image viewing program! It's amazing how much has changed. From the point of view of a search engine, though, the web still looks pretty much the same as it did back in 1993. After all, most of the advances in the 15 years since Mosaic 2.0 was released have been about pictures, animation, and sound. Great for people, but computers are pretty much blind and deaf. They can process text-based information but if you put content such as text inside a picture it may as well not exist. To experience the web as a search engine sees it you can use a variety of tools like this one: webtools.live2support.com/se_simulator.php Flash is another technology that can lock content away from search engines and prevent them seeing it, because the browser itself can't understand or process Flash objects: it needs to use a plug-in from Adobe which displays the object for it. When you look at a site containing Flash your browser doesn't even know what it's displaying. It just knows there's a "box" of content being displayed, but not what is happening inside it. Search engines are the same, and they've traditionally treated Flash-based content as an inscrutible block of nothingness. There *are* ways to provide alternative access to content displayed using Flash but they're clumsy and an additional burden on web developers so Flash-based sites have always been considered second-class citizens when it comes to search engines. But now Adobe's Flash player technology has been licenced by Google and the rules may be about to change forever. What Google are doing is using Adobe's technology to give their systems the ability to "see" into Flash-based content, making text inside Flash objects as easy to find as text in a regular web page. They've already deployed the first version of their new system with Flash support and as of July 3rd it's been shown that content contained within Flash can now actually be found using the Google search engine. Search Engine War in the UK ran some tests and proved that Googlebot could find and follow links embedded inside Flash objects: www.search-engine-war.co.uk/2008/07/flash-time-to-c.html It's not all peaches and cream though. At present the Googlebot can only see Flash if it has been embedded within the web page in a certain way, and there are also problems with "deep linking": providing a link from a search result page to a specific piece of content within a Flash object. What many people will probably find is that they see a search result to content that looks like it's just what they need, but when they click on it they won't go to the content they're expecting but just to the "home" of the Flash object and then have to find their own way to the correct place. Flash is still a difficult beast when it comes to playing nicely with search engines, but at least Google have taken a big step in the right direction and implemented the first stage of support for what is now a very widely used technology. Cheers :-) Jonathan Oxer Technical Director Internet Vision Technologies