Google and Yahoo search with Adobe

Trio team up to improve dynamic content search

Ian Williams, vnunet.com 01 Jul 2008

Adobe is teaming up with Google and Yahoo to help improve search results for Flash-based dynamic web content and rich internet applications (RIAs).

Adobe has said that it will give Google and Yahoo technology to enhance search engine indexing of the SWF Flash file format.

Although search engines already index static text and links within SWF files, it can be difficult fully to expose RIAs to search engines because of their dynamic nature.

"Until now it has been extremely challenging to search the millions of RIAs and dynamic content on the web, so we are leading the charge in improving search of content that runs in 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 to significantly improve search of this rich content on the web, and we intend to broaden the availability of this capability to benefit all content publishers, developers and end users."

Adobe's Flash Player is installed on 98 per cent of internet connected PCs, making it one of the most pervasive platforms for delivering rich content on websites.

This collaboration should help provide more relevant automatic search rankings of the dynamic content that runs in Adobe Flash Player.

As a result, millions of pre-existing Flash-based RIAs and dynamic web experiences, including content that loads at runtime, are immediately searchable without the need for companies and developers to alter the content.

"Google has been working hard to improve how we can read and discover SWF files," said Bill Coughran, senior vice president of engineering at Google.

"Improving how we crawl dynamic content will ultimately enhance the search experience for our users."

Unlike Google, Yahoo has not yet rolled out the improvements but expects to do so in a future update.

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