Google Learns to Index Flash

Search engines are finally moving past plain text. Google has announced it’s now indexing Flash content with the help of a new partnership with Adobe.

The company’s new Flash indexing algorithm will let the engine find any kind of SWF content and grab textual content out of it. The system, Google’s software engineers explain, actually “sees” the files the same way a user would — by automatically clicking through the buttons and entering input. It uses a new Searchable SWF library provided by Adobe.

Interestingly, the library was also given to Yahoo — which, fittingly enough, has yet to finish and launch its own version of the Flash index function. Hey, give ‘em a few weeks. It’s not like Yahoo has anything to prove right now.