Why is .swf not searchable....

[mat_bastian]

What technical issues create the impossibility of spidering and indexing content and links within an .swf file.

Given that the swf is an open source file format that happens to be the file form that Macromedia's Flash, Swish, and Wildforms products as well as numerous others output to. And the most widely used player of swf's is also a Macromedia product, "Macromedia Flash Player", who is it incumbent upon to make the swf searchable, macromedia, the open source community, the search engines?

We all know that FAST has sort of side stepped the issue and is leading the way by utilizing Macromedia Flash SDK. Should we expect all search engines to follow suit even if the SDK is a proprietary product?

I would love to here from you all, but please restrain yourselves from saying anything to the effect of "Flash sucks, and is only for blah blah blah... it doesn't need to be searchable" cause that is an issue for another thread.

Thanks,
Mat

[mat_bastian]

I'm gonna drop a url here cause although I have mispoke in calling the swf an opensource format, this article sheds a little light on the difference between "Flash" and "swf"

[oreillynet.com...]

[mat_bastian]

anyone? any ideas? I swear that I've read about really simple to build swf parsers. Also, I know that depending on the way one publishes thier flash site, they can make all text show in metatags. There is alot of bright people on these boards, surely one of you can lend your thoughts to a discussion.

[oilman]

I don't have a really good answer other than to say I heard somewhere that swf is searchable now - none of it ranks anywhere but the technology to parse it is a no brainer and if the SEs wanted to they could index it. Don't quote me on that - I just seem to recall hearing/reading it somewhere - there is every chance I could be wrong. If nothing else I'm giving the thread a bump back up the active list :)

[korkus2000]

Should we expect engines to index it?

Absolutely. They are working on it. No matter what people say Flash is here to stay. Macromedia has a huge market share of the web design world. They are now shipping Flash with the entire MX suite. I would expect to see more Flash sites. If search engines refuse to index them they will only make their indexes irrelavent leaving out a lot of the web.

Macromedia released the SDK and now no engine has an excuse not to add the sites. Fast has made it neccessary for other engines to get it going. IMHO as Flash evolves you will see it become less contained and expose more of itself. I think in the future we will see both Macromedia and the engines meet in the middle. Macromedia and Fast have started the process. Google can spider the links. We will probably see Google have full Flash indexability before the year end.

[Marcia]

>technology to parse it

Assuming the technology is available to parse it, how resource intensive would that be? Would it be of enough benefit for search engines to expend the resources in order to do it?

If I'm not mistaken, I believe that's why JS isn't parsed, which is why we see a certain number of redirects still getting by. The search engines have to know about those, for one thing they generate a lot of 404's out of the cache for Google if they use relative URLs. But apparently they've opted not to parse JS anyway.

[edited by: Marcia at 8:04 pm (utc) on Feb. 19, 2003]

[jeremy goodrich]

I believe there is a free swf parser or something an SDK perhaps - from Macromedia.

Why search engines don't immediately start ranking all flash sites #1 is beyond me...

however, I do know that when I build a site in the all new, Penguin format ( it's a proprietary vector based algorithm that exists only in my mind - in other words, a joke ) all the pages are immediately #5000 for their target keyword phrase. :)

Sorry, no answers here. I guess perhaps there isn't enough flash content to justify more integration...? Dunno.

[korkus2000]

If we ask why the majors aren't ranking it now its because they are too busy dealing with regular html. They are indexing PDFs, but thats because many information papers are published that way on the web. They are just overworked. They will fit Flash in when they have time. I am sure it is on the short list of functionality requirements.

[4eyes]

They may have the capability to index Flash, but do they really want to?

They will be asking themselves whether increasing the number of flash sites in the SERPs will lead to a better customer experience?

It will be interesting to see which search engine is brave enough to risk giving flash equal status in SERPS, and interesting to see its effect on their market share.

IMO, our "Pro-Flash" or "Anti-Flash" opinions are somewhat irrelevant compared to the measured effect on their traffic.