SWF is Searchable

Adobe SWF files that run in the flash player will now be searchable. Adobe published SWF searchability FAQ earlier this morning explaining the details of what this implies.

Web spiders will now be able to playback SWF(s) like users and cull out the data to add to their index. This announcement has two huge impacts:

• Traditionally, a big disadvantage of making flash player applications was that they were not properly visible to the search engines. This won’t be true going forward.
• By enabling search indexing via playback, a new era is going to begin. Traditionally text has been the favorite media for search engines. Hopefully this announcement heralds the good news of better rich media indexing in general. We would all like to search audio and video content based on the information they contain and not just the way they are tagged.

Congratulations to Adobe, Google and Yahoo for this new development.