Juzer Burhani

Adobe announced that it provided some its Flash technology to Google and Yahoo in order to improve the indexing of SWF files and especially Flex applications. "Although search engines already index static text and links within SWF files, RIAs and dynamic web content have been generally difficult to fully expose to search engines because of their changing states."



To solve this problem, Adobe decided to share Flash Player technology that allows search engines to walk through a SWF file and simulate user interactions. "We've developed an algorithm that explores Flash files in the same way that a person would, by clicking buttons, entering input, and so on. Our algorithm remembers all of the text that it encounters along the way, and that content is then available to be indexed," explains Google's Webmaster Blog. The indexing algorithm, which is already live, has some important limitations: it ignores Flash files loaded using JavaScript and it separately handles external resources loaded by Flash files.



I couldn't find too many Flash sites that are fully indexed by Google, probably because we need to wait until Google updates its index.

The newfound bonhomie between Yahoo & Google is not just about AdSense, the two companies are connecting their popular IM clients as well.

That means you no longer require any third-party hacks to chat with your Yahoo! Messenger friends using Google Talk and vice-versa.

From the PR: “Yahoo! and Google agreed to enable interoperability between their respective instant messaging services bringing easier and broader communication to users.”

Microsoft & Yahoo already offer interoperability between Windows Live Messenger and Yahoo! Messenger so this gives Yahoo! users the best of both worlds – they can talk with friends on Google Talk as well as those who on are MSN Messenger.