TechNote (Archived)

Flash and Search Engines

Introduction

There are a number of methods available for getting information about a Macromedia Flash movie picked up by popular search engines such as Google.

Macromedia Flash Search Engine SDK
The Macromedia Flash Search Engine SDK 1.0 provides search engines with the means to search and index Macromedia Flash (SWF) movies. The swf2html utility used by the SDK extracts text and links from a Macromedia Flash SWF file, and outputs it to stdout or to an HTML document. When a search engine deploys this SDK, users can locate relevant Flash content when searching by keyword or file type.

The Macromedia Flash Search Engine SDK is primarily designed for search engine application engineering teams. Intermediate and advanced Macromedia Flash developers may find the SDK useful for other server-based text and link extraction/conversion purposes, or for client-side testing of their Macromedia Flash content against the basic Macromedia Flash Search Engine SDK code.
Publish Templates
Since Macromedia Flash 4, Flash has had a mechanism that will export the text within a movie into the HTML file published with a SWF file. This information, contained in the HTML of the page embedding the Macromedia Flash SWF is what a search engine looks for when indexing the page.
Manually Add META Information
The majority of search engines search for a specific set of information located in the META tag of an HTML file. Site developers can use a text editor to add/edit this information in the HTML file that embeds the Macromedia Flash SWF file.
Use a Custom Search Engine
There are a few search engines that actually parse through a Macromedia SWF file and catalogue information based on the content of that SWF:
- Atomz - http://www.atomz.com/
- PicoSearch - http://www.picosearch.com/

Additional Information

Search engine submission and search engine optimization is a broad topic, beyond the scope of this TechNote. For a broader overview of these topics see Search Engine Watch.