Google adds external resource indexing for Flash sites/apps

Posted by on Jun 19, 2009 in Flash | 1 comment

Exciting news resonated through the Twittersphere today as Google announced that they’ve now added the ability to index external resources for Flash sites and applications.

When your Flash based site or application loads content from another file (text, HTML, XML, script, another SWF, …) Google can now also index that external content.

While Ichabod – the headless Flash Player that Google uses to enable this – offers even more functionality than what Google offers today, this is obviously really exciting news. If you want to learn more about Ichabod, definitely check out Jim Corbet’s session from Max 2008.

Read more about Google’s implementation on Google’s Webmaster Central.

Flash on!

Update: According to Google’s blog, it seems that this is now limited to AS1 and AS2. I’m trying to find out more about that. Will keep you posted.

Update: Google confirmed that they also index AS3 based content. They also updated their blog post.

1 Comment

  1. Bram
    June 19, 2009

    I fail to see how this benefits the end user. It will be increasingly difficult to find the content and keywords you’ve searched for. Most flash content is not yet made accessible via code like swf-address.

    I will most likely skip flash results when using google.