Every semester, I get a student challenging my assertion that Google doesn't really handle Flash well. "Macromedia released an SDK, and they've worked with Google!" they shout.
It's always the Computer Science kids who say this. And they're technically right, Googlebot (and the other SE crawlers) can parse Flash and read it.
But Google doesn't care about what it reads in the Flash! SE's want to see what people see. And there is no way for them to verify that people will actually see any given piece of a Flash file. It's just too complex.
A recent example highlighted this again. For a Google 'site' search of my new corporate Overlord, the Flash movie on the home page got its own entry:
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[FLASH] w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w ...
File Format: Shockwave Flash
w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w ...
innuity.com/userimages/innuity_home_center.swf - Similar pages
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Is that how you want your site to show up in the search engines? No? Very good. Then don't rely on Flash. Do it the right way -- hybrid HTML with judicious Flash insets, with all content duplicated in HTML elsewhere on the page.
In other news, Dido is still some really great music to kick on in the backround at work. Relaxing, electronic grooves to ease the pain of programming and solving a hundred random problems each day. Ahh...
Comments (2)
two comments in one day. A major missing link for search engines (no pun inteneded, really) is in image recognition. its a rather complex field, especially when an low quality image that looks like john doe AND george bush -- which one is it?
"The grand challenge of vision, particularly image recognition, lies in constructing a unified framework for modeling image content with appropriate semantic abstraction levels."
http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/full/96/25/14203
Just think, we will bring new sight to the blind at the same time.
It can, and will be done, and probably has far more useful applications that a search engine, but the search engines could bring it out.
"This weekend, robot cars competed in a challenge that most humans would find trivial: drive 132 miles in 12 hours without crashing. Yet crash, they do. The difficult part isn’t so much the steering and acceleration, it’s determining the difference between an obstacle you must navigate around and a benign shadow on the road; it’s deciding whether that dark patch ahead is open roadway or deep water. These things are so easy for humans that we take them for granted, yet for a machine it’s a task literally in its infancy."
http://cognitivedaily.com/?p=112
Naturally, the first key will be in studying human/biological/psychological behavior and applying it to computing systems. who cares about computational power required, linux clusters are a dime a dozen these days.
Posted by eran | February 25, 2006 2:22 AM
Posted on February 25, 2006 02:22
Good point. Search Engines still can't see the web the way we do.
Here's another cool reason why Flash is no good:
"The Bibliochaise is a gorgeous armchair that integrates five linear metres of book-shelf into its exterior. Regrettably, the manufacturer's site is built entirely of Flash and individual items can't be linked to -- link below goes to Gizmodo post on the chair."
This was a front-page post on a popular blog site.
Posted by Tom Dalton | April 19, 2006 8:02 PM
Posted on April 19, 2006 20:02