June 27, 2005
Google now indexing Flash files
flash insider is reporting that google is indexing flash files. What does that mean? Well, they state that the plain text contents of the flash file are being displayed in the description fields (the linked text)…here is an example I found:
It shows the actual text from the flash where you usually see the “loading…” messages.
I also tried out a few tests and noticed that they also allow “.fla” searches but flag it is “File Format: Unrecognized - View as HTML” and the HTML version is empty.
As with file types that don’t have metadata nor parseable text, I wonder how much information comes from the HTML surrounding the movies (i.e. the page in which it is embedded), etc. My preliminary searches show that all of words are coming out of the actual file itself.
I don’t know why they didn’t start this sooner…there are plenty of libraries available to at leats get them started (they could simply build on it the same way they will build on top of VLC for their video search (there is a “Install the Google Video Viewer” link on that page).
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randfish said,
June 30, 2005 @ 11:45 pm
As far as I know, Google has been indexing Flash for more than a year, and you’re right - I haven’t seen them go beyond what’s put in the HTML page by the SWF document itself.