Comments on: Meetro

By: Bookmarks about Markup

Bookmarks about Markup — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 16:45:25 +0000

[...] – bookmarked by 6 members originally found by PriscillaRenea on 2008-08-16 Black Hole Revelations: Understanding Flash http://www.techcrunchit.com/2008/07/02/black-hole-revelations-understanding-flash/ – bookmarked by [...]

By: Greg McMuffin

Greg McMuffin — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 08:06:36 +0000

Ovi is correct, in that with RIA’s deep search engine indexing isn’t even necessary in the first place. They just need to get people to the front door and the current HTML that holds the flash/flex apps can do that with the proper tags. But people just love to bash anything related to Flash without being informed.

By: Краудсорсинг в действии: перевод седьмого тома Гарри Поттера за два дня

Краудсорсинг в действии: перевод седьмого тома Гарри Поттера за два дня — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 21:52:30 +0000

[...] Black Hole Revelations: Understanding Flash [...]

By: Ovi

Ovi — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 14:58:26 +0000

This is all so irrelevant. No one seems to understand that these days when it comes to serious content driven RIAs, the swf files, xap or xaml contain absolutely NO content, they are merely content pulling engines. The content worth indexing comes from databases or web services most of the time. So all the content the engines are going to find is some dummy placeholders the developers left in for testing.

By: Nik Cubrilovic

Nik Cubrilovic — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 23:56:00 +0000

Ye good point Ryan.

By: Brad Curtis

Brad Curtis — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 23:29:49 +0000

Ryan is correct. This is of no benefit if the content is 10 clicks deep within the flash app and not indexable by a query string. You will still need to design for crawlability from the outset,

By: Ryan

Ryan — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 23:18:09 +0000

None of this matters. If you have one of the millions of (designed completely in) flash sites the only url you will see in your toolbar will be THE SAME URL for every page. Think about what this means in terms of deep linking pages on your site, ranking keyword landing pages – still impossible. Organic deep linking will not happen.

By: mcaulay

mcaulay — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 21:06:19 +0000

agree with Charles, progressive enhancement is key whether you’re using a swf or javascript. Our favourite method is to write out the dynamic content into the html and replace that content using a swf(which is displaying the same content, only nicer) served with swfobject, this ensures that if you’re one of the minority not using a flash player or have javascript disabled, you still have access to the content you expect to find…and so do the search engines.

By: bitpakkit

bitpakkit — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 21:04:22 +0000

The big opportunity here is to design apps with searchable states, not to get hung up about Google and Yahoo! attempting to index UX. You still need a strategy.

By: sayed sajjad hussain

sayed sajjad hussain — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 19:30:40 +0000

It seems to be a good news if the benefits could be realised sooner.

By: Charles

Charles — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 18:51:27 +0000

Well put Nic.

Two words for web developers considering flash…”Progressive Enhancement”

By: Laurent

Laurent — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 18:37:19 +0000

Wait a minute: flash indexing has been there for many years, when Adobe gave out swf2txt, a simple command line tool to extract text from SWF files. What would be interesting is to know how better the new version given out by Adobe performs, especially for retrieval purposes.

By: Jeremy Chone

Jeremy Chone — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 15:17:10 +0000

This is definitely a good move for Flash and SEO (for consumer application). I would be curious to know if this works for dynamic content as well.

By: Sebastian

Sebastian — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 13:46:44 +0000

Why does everybody miss the most important point here?

–> Google and Yahoo could have created this software themselves, the SWF specification would have allowed them to do so!

The fact that they did NOT do that – even Google, which has unlimited resources – shows, how little interest they had in Flash content.
It’s not like Google never created parsing software for other file formats – they have parsers for PDF (open like SWF), MSOffice documents, etc.

By: Andy

Andy — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 10:56:35 +0000

As most content is loaded in from external resources, into a Flash file, and everyone uses different techniques for deep linking, I think it will be a very slow process for the benefits of this to be felt. And getting to the first page of Google for a given query with a Flash file would be a very great achievement! Perhaps there should be a competition. Anyone who gets to page 1 for “George Bush” with a Flash file!

But it’s of course good news that innovation with RIAs, from UI interfaces to search, continues.