Macromedia Flash Search Engine SDK

Hello! A coworker just sent this link over to me. Has anyone heard of any of the major crawlers implementing this? We use flash heavily, and I'd love to be able to tell our designers their Flash sites will now be searchable.

Macromedia on SDK

According to their FAQ:

quote:

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Will search engines that deploy the Macromedia Flash Search Engine SDK be able to decompress my compressed Macromedia Flash Player 6 files?

Yes. The Flash Search Engine SDK code supports SWF files created for Flash Player 3, 4, 5 and 6.

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So what do you think, can I get excited yet?

Those using flash redirects won't be too excited !

Why?

I too, read their announcement and the PR blurb that went with it. Unfortunately, I am not a techie and the intricacies of it are beyond my skill level. However, I can say this - search engine rankings are determined by text content, not graphical content. If there is inadequate text content on the page, then the search engines have nothing to index.

Hopefully someone with more technical skills than me, can provide further input.

I see what you mean. Some developes who use Flash only as an animation tool would not benefit very much from the implementation this. But, for those people who are developing entire sites in Flash (where the real power of the product is), this could be a significant step. I saw a Macromedia presentation where the interaction between Flash and Cold Fusion was demonstrated, and I could see the great possibilities of data driven flash content. The only major drawback I could see was the fact that search engines could not recognize such content. If this works well, then I can see a lot of developers moving more heavily into the Flash arena.

Granted, there will always be the issue that not everyone has the flash plugin. But, for certain demographics, I'm positive that it would be worth it to develop in flash as long as the content could show up in a search.

I'd still love to hear the tech standpoint on this if anyone has some insight.

I haven't used the sdk yet. But I was reading a little about it at macromedia. They provide a tool swftohtml (i think..swf2html maybe?) which has obvious uses. This is what I think they intend to have the SE's implement on the back-end. But, if it's worth the effort I'm sure that you could make use of it to cut the time of producing an HTML version of your flash work.