Tuesday, Jul 1, 2008    Text size: 

Working in conjunction with Google and Yahoo, Adobe Systems has found a way to allow the two major search engines to index text-based content on Flash-based websites.

It works like this: Adobe has deployed a virtual Flash player that will work on behalf of the search engines to explore Flash-based websites and index their text-based content.

Representatives for Google wrote on the company blog that URLs, as well as text, would be indexed.

"In addition to finding and indexing the textual content in Flash files, we're also discovering URLs that appear in Flash files and feeding them into our crawling pipeline-just like we do with URLs that appear in non-Flash webpages," they said. "For example, if your Flash application contains links to pages inside your website, Google may now be better able to discover and crawl more of your website."

Adobe's VP of Marketing Michele Turner conceded that a low profile on search-engines "has been a big problem for those developing rich applications."

But how will this development affect adult?

Google's indexing technology has run afoul of the adult industry before. In 2006, adult publisher Perfect 10 filed suit against Google because the company's search engine was indexing copyrighted thumbnails from the company's website.

Given the increasing popularity of Flash-based video content on adult sites, should the adult industry prepare to defend its turf against the mighty spiders of Google?

Probably not. Online guru Brandon "Fight The Patent" told XBIZ that Google's search-engine crawlers can't penetrate members areas.

In addition, despite the prominence of Flash-based videos from YouTube on Google's search engines, the company's current efforts will only focus on text-based content.

"At present, we are only discovering and indexing textual content in Flash files," Google representatives said. "If your Flash files only include images, we will not recognize or index any text that may appear in those images. Similarly, we do not generate any anchor text for Flash buttons which target some URL, but which have no associated text. Also note that we do not index FLV files, such as the videos that play on YouTube, because these files contain no text elements."

That said, will this new development encourage adult producers to embrace all-Flash sites? Though it's difficult to predict, Matrix Content President Stephen Bugbee told XBIZ that although he's assisted in the development of all-Flash adult sites in the past, none of them have made it past the development stage.

"We have tried it, but it still takes out the lowest common denominator of a user because of connection speeds, et cetera," he said.

Google has already started indexing Flash-based websites, while Yahoo will start indexing Flash content at an unspecified date in the future.

For more information, visit Google's blog.