In a move that could revolutionize the Web itself, Adobe has announced that it will help the two major search engines, Google and Yahoo to improve the flash search engine indexing of the Flash file format (SWF) and uncover information that is currently undiscoverable by search engines.

What is odd is that Adobe has decided to provide the optimized Adobe Flash Player technology only for those two search engine, which means that other organizations that are providing search services such as Microsoft’s Live Search or Ask.com won’t be able to index the dynamic Web content and rich Internet applications (RIAs).

Maybe one of the reasons why Microsoft was left outside by Adobe, despite being the third biggest search engine in terms of market share, is its Silverlight technology.

Microsoft Silverlight was first released in April last year as a competitor to Adobe Flash, Adobe Flex, Adobe Shockwave, Java FX, and Apple QuickTime. The 2.0 incarnation, released in April this year, brought improved interactivity and allows developers to use .NET languages and development tools.

Microsoft claims that Silverlight’s advantage compared to Flash is that it reduces development and deployment costs and provides enhanced Web audio and video streaming and playback, being fully compatible with Windows Media Technologies.

Many have been lured into considering Silverlight a competitor for Flash because of the shiny interface that characterizes Silverlight applications and because of the video-rendering capabilities of the plug-in, which kind of makes it similar to Adobe Flash Player.
Silverlight is a cross-browser and also a cross-platform plug-in, integrating with both Windows and Macintosh, and with Linux in the near future; it enables rendering of richer user experiences that are defined by XAML.

Still, earlier this year, Microsoft licensed Adobe’s Flash Lite software, specifically designed for mobile devices, together with Adobe Reader LE software for viewing Portable Document Formats (PDF).

However, letting aside the Microsoft issue, Adobe’ decision could change the way we see the web sites and interact with certain features.
RIA developers and rich Web content producers won’t need to amend existing and future content to make it searchable, they can now be confident it can be found by users around the globe. And this means that more and more organizations could choose Flash so Flash-based solutions to create and enrich their websites.

Google has already begun to roll out Adobe Flash Player technology incorporated into its search engine, while Yahoo said that it will deliver improved Web search capabilities for SWF applications in a future update to Yahoo! Search.
However, Google explained in a post on its webmaster blog that there are some technical limitations of its ability to index Flash. There are three main limitations at present.

For example, Googlebot does not execute some types of JavaScript. So if  a certain web page loads a Flash file via JavaScript, Google may not be aware of that Flash file, in which case it will not be indexed.

Also, Googlebot does not attach content from external resources that are loaded by the Flash files. If a Flash file loads an HTML file, an XML file, another SWF file, etc., Google will separately index that resource, but it will not yet be considered to be part of the content in the initial Flash file.

A third limitation regards the language, specifically  the Flash content written in bidirectional languages. “Until this is fixed, we will be unable to index Hebrew language or Arabic language content from Flash files” wrote Google.