More-Searchable Flash

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Analysts agree that it's important to make more of the Web searchable, and Adobe's move is crucial. However, it's an intermediate step, says Peter Elst, a Flash platform consultant. While the move opens up more text and links to search engines, site designers should have "control over what exactly gets indexed and how it should be interpreted by a search engine," Elst says. With conventional Web pages, designers exert that control by adding metadata and tags that describe their sites. But, Elst says, that's not yet possible with the new Flash tools.

At this stage, says Elst, many Flash programmers are concerned about how Google and Yahoo will use their newly acquired information to rank sites. "As far as we know," he says, "the data that gets indexed is just a raw dump, and no context is applied, making it difficult to figure out how you can actually use this to do search-engine optimization and get higher page ranks."

Google has dropped some hints about how it will handle Flash searches. For instance, its spiders currently will not load Flash applications that use the language JavaScript, so those applications may not get indexed. But in the end, people and businesses that want to promote their websites may need to use trial and error to figure out how to build Flash sites that search engines will rank highly, adjusting their tactics as Google's and Yahoo's algorithms change. But then that's what they had to do with traditional HTML sites anyway.