Adobe signs Flash deal with Google and Yahoo

Adobe has announced a deal with Google and Yahoo that twill see the three companies working together to make Flash more search engine-friendly.

The agreement sees Adobe providing Google and Yahoo with optimised Flash tools that will enhance a search engine’s indexing of Flash files.

The move will also help provide more relevant automatic search rankings of the millions of Flash applications embedded into web pages and available for download.

In a statement, general manager and vice president of the platform business unit at Adobe said that Adobe were “leading the charge” on search content.

“Until now it has been extremely challenging to search the millions of [Flash] applications on the web, so we are leading the charge in improving search of content that runs within Adobe Flash Player,” said David Wadhwani, general manager and vice president of the platform business unit at Adobe.

“We are initially working with Google and Yahoo, and we intend to broaden the availability of this capability to benefit all content publishers, developers and end users.”

However, as detailed on Google’s official webmaster’s blog, the search engine has admitted that there are currently three technical limitations of Google’s ability to index Flash.

Firstly, Googlebot does not execute some types of JavaScript. If a web page loads a Flash file via JavaScript, Google may not be aware of that Flash file, meaning it will not be indexed. Secondly, Google currently does not attach content from external resources that are loaded by Flash files. If a Flash file loads an HTML file, an XML file or another SWF file, Google will separately index that resource, but it will not yet be considered to be part of the content in a Flash file. Finally, there are currently difficulties with Flash content written in bidirectional languages, meaning Google is unable to index Hebrew language or Arabic language content from Flash files.

Meanwhile, Yahoo intends to deliver improved web search capabilities for Flash applications in a future update to Yahoo Search.

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