[News] Google adds Flash to search tools

[adi4x]

I think this is a very good news for flash developers and not only.

Google has announced that users will now be able to index and search Flash media files.

The company has added the code into its indexing algorithm which will allow its indexing bots to gather text from the SWF files used to present Flash content.

Google users will be able to search through code contained within the Flash file itself, as well as Flash banners, buttons and menus.

Read all
http://www.vnunet.com/vnunet/news/22...h-search-tools

[.hooligan]

This will be great for all those great sites built entirely in flash. Get their rankings up.

Not sure about the "Google users will be able to search through code contained within the Flash file itself" part though.

[renderhjs]

http://board.flashkit.com/board/showthread.php?t=771001

and even there not new news,- in fact adobe has already for some time tools to download to test your own swf files so you know what search engines read out of your swf files.
Google supported this already for some time,- might be that they now consider it as even more important but they did already in the past

[Articulate-Dee]

this isn't too new...I quite fancy the idea though.

[realMakc]

google finally indexes external content loaded in swf

[.hooligan]

How would they do this? Without decompiling the swf?

[flashisland]

We click buttons and enter input, just like a user would.

It sounds like they might actually have some sort of screen-reader software that is interacting directly with the Flash movie. They say they can also read obfuscated files and that "the ActionScript version isn't particularly relevant in our Indexing process", so it doesn't sound like they are decompiling it.

[realMakc]

they do some sort of decompilation, google can find urls in code that is never called

[BlinkOk]

so could i search my .swf for strings of readable characters and then use google to search for those strings in order to see where my .swf has travelled?

[.hooligan]

Yeah by read obfuscated files they mean files with read obfuscated code. So they must decompile them.

Just seems wrong that they assume the whole world is cool with them decompiling their code. There better be no way that source can be searched.

[realMakc]

cant speak for whole world but I'm cool with them decompiling my code.