Google is cacheing Flash?

What the heck is going on.

[ncsuk]

I think Google may well of figured out how to use text from images because it seems as if now it is cacheing flash images.

Take a look at this SERP

[google.com...]

Do a search for a domain name and look for all pages. On every flash site ive checked there are flash images slapped in there will a full URL.

Can anyone confirm or deny what is going on?

[takagi]

Hi ncsuk, on the SERP I only see text for the non-swf files. For the swf-files there is only a URL and 'Similar pages' so no title, no cache, no snippet. Therefore I see no indication that Google is caching these Flash files.

Sometimes Google displays this kind of information if a link is found but the file has not yet been spidered or the file is in a format that cannot be processed.

In this [webmasterworld.com] thread GoogleGuy mentions this phenomenon in message 8 and 10

In practice, there's lots of reasons that Google might not have the content of the page. There could be a robots.txt file, or the server could have been down, or we might have seen references to that page but not crawled it, or there could have been redirects, meta tags, etc.
....
It turns out that www.aclin.org forbids all spiders, but Google is still able to pull descriptions from the Open Directory, for example.

He is writing about a page that has not been spidered. And if you check it, it now has a PR7.

So in the case you are describing, the FLASH files are linked (and therefore Google 'knows' they exist and Google can find similar pages) but they are not necessarily spidered.

[ncsuk]

After all the fuss that has been going on recently it could be possible that Google is toying with the idea of ripping text / html out of flash files. About time too I say...

I personally hate flash because its a pain in the butt however if they can make it spiderable then that would open a whole new world up for us.

[WarmGlow]

...it could be possible that Google is toying with the idea of ripping text / html out of flash files.

Google has gone beyond toying. They have the technology and they are using it. I saw a web page today that is credited by Google with a backlink coming from a Macromedia .swf file on a remote site. I opened the .swf file in my web browser and discovered that Google assigned a PageRank to the .swf file. Amazing, absolutely amazing.

[Morgan]

I don't know for sure if this is the case where you're looking, but there's a difference between PageRank of a spidered page and PageRank of files in general.

For example, enter the full URL of an image and you will see that Google extrapolates some PageRank for it based on how far down in a directory structure it is, but if you look to see if the page has been cached, it hasn't.

I'm not saying Google isn't doing this, just that PageRank showing up for a file other than HTML is not extraordinary. Now if Google actually stored a cached version of the .swf, I'd definitely be surprised.

[WarmGlow]

Now if Google actually stored a cached version of the .swf, I'd definitely be surprised.

Google did not offer a cached version of the .swf file and I do not know why that would be of any value to a Google user, anyway. My observation is that Google followed a link originating in a .swf file and then credited the remotely hosted web page with a backlink from that .swf file.