Just now, Adobe announced its collaboration with Google and Yahoo! to enhance the searchability of SWF content by helping their spiders playback SWFs in the Adobe Flash Player runtime. This is going to be a really big announcement for Flash Player and for the community.

Searchability of any dynamic technology is a difficult task because of the ever-changing nature of the content. By running SWFs through the runtime the spiders will have access to the content as it is seen by end-users. Google and Yahoo! Search can then take the text and link data and add the relevance back to the hosting page. The search partners are implementing the logic to navigate the application and can also choose how to make use of the data that is returned by Flash Player.

For Flash content producers, nothing has to be done to take advantage of SWF searchability. All SWF content will be accessible as it will be running through Flash Player. We do expect that the SEO community will start to generate best practices over time as it becomes clear what will cause content to be more useful to spiders.

All of this is going on now! Google is already in progress with spidering SWF content through the new system. Over the next weeks and months, you should see some pretty significant impact on the indicies as SWF content is made a first-class citizen for searchability. For more information, take a look at our official FAQ on the Adobe Developer Connection.