March 1, 2007

Google indexing flash

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Cameron Manderson @ 8:37 am

I was suprised to find today that google was indexing some of my flash files which has lead to some discussion about how google is extracting the text, how it is navigating etc. We assume that now they must be using OCR, as the original issue was extracting the text from the flash file without ensuring that it is displayed to the user. A call to google or a hunt on the net is in order! If anyone knows anything about how this is working and ways for flash developers to code up google’able friendly flash swf files please post!

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4 Comments »

  1. I understand google have been indexing SWF’s for some time, but we are interested in how it is now matching them higher and extracting more accurately :-) How would it move the user through your movie to where it saw the text? or is it a case that it is only going to match the text at the point you enter?

    Comment by Cameron Manderson — March 1, 2007 @ 8:41 am

  2. When you publish a movie with a body of static text Flash prints it in comment tags above the embed tags. Here’s the result of publishing a movie containing some lorem ipsum in a dynamic textbox:

    <!--text used in the movie-->
<!--
It is a long established fact that a reader will be distracted by the readable content of a page when looking at its layout. The point of using Lorem Ipsum is that it has a more-or-less normal distribution of letters, as opposed to using 'Content here, content here', making it look like readable English. Many desktop publishing packages and web page editors now use Lorem Ipsum as their default model text, and a search for 'lorem ipsum' will uncover many web sites still in their infancy. Various versions have evolved over the years, sometimes by accident, sometimes on purpose (injected humour and the like).
-->

    Comment by Richard Lee — March 1, 2007 @ 9:20 am

  3. Hey, if you check out the adobe site, there is a link for the flash search sdk deep in there somewhere. It will take in an SWF and spit out the html that google comes up with when it runs through it. It’s very straightforward, and should help you learn about how flash saves that information!

    Comment by Brenton Henry — May 23, 2007 @ 9:07 am

  4. Hi Brent, sorry for the late reply things have been quiet around here… Thanks for the info though i found the link to the Flash SDK (http://www.adobe.com/licensing/developer/search/faq/).

    Comment by Richard Lee — August 22, 2007 @ 12:08 pm

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