Adobe Flash Technology Enhances Search Results for Dynamic Content and Rich Internet Applications

SAN JOSE, Calif. - July 1, 2008 - Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq:ADBE) today announced the company is teaming up with search industry leaders to dramatically improve search results of dynamic Web content and rich Internet applications (RIAs). Adobe is providing optimized Adobe® Flash® Player technology to Google and Yahoo! to enhance search engine indexing of the Flash file format (SWF) and uncover information that is currently undiscoverable by search engines. This will provide more relevant automatic search rankings of the millions of RIAs and other dynamic content that run in Adobe Flash Player. Moving forward, 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.

The openly published SWF specification describes the file format used to deliver rich applications and interactive content via Adobe Flash Player, which is installed on more than 98 percent of Internet-connected computers. 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 - a problem also inherent in other RIA technologies.

"Until now it has been extremely challenging to search the millions of RIAs and dynamic content on the Web, so we are leading the charge in improving search of content that runs in Adobe Flash Player," said David Wadhwani, general manager and vice president of the Platform Business Unit at Adobe. "We are initially working with Google and Yahoo! to significantly improve search of this rich content on the Web, and we intend to broaden the availability of this capability to benefit all content publishers, developers and end users."

Google has already begun to roll out Adobe Flash Player technology incorporated into its search engine. With Adobe's help, Google can now better read the content on sites that use Adobe Flash technology, helping users find more relevant information when conducting searches. As a result, millions of pre-existing RIAs and dynamic Web experiences that utilize Adobe Flash technology, including content that loads at runtime, are immediately searchable without the need for companies and developers to alter them.

"Google has been working hard to improve how we can read and discover SWF files," said Bill Coughran, senior vice president of engineering at Google. "Through our recent collaboration with Adobe, we now help Web site owners that choose to design sites with Adobe Flash software by indexing this content better. Improving how we crawl dynamic content will ultimately enhance the search experience for our users."

Yahoo! also expects to deliver improved Web search capabilities for SWF applications in a future update to Yahoo! Search. "Yahoo! is committed to supporting webmaster needs with plans to support searchable SWF and is working with Adobe to determine the best possible implementation," said Sean Suchter, vice president Yahoo! Search Technology Engineering.

"Designers and Web developers have long been frustrated that search engines couldn't better access the information within their content created with Flash technology. It's great to see Adobe and the search engines working directly together to improve the situation," said Danny Sullivan, editor-in-chief, SearchEngineLand.com. "The changes should help unlock information that's previously been 'invisible' and will likely result in a better experience for searchers."

Here are some of the limitations that are being worked on by Google

1. Googlebot does not execute some types of JavaScript. So if your 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.
2. We currently do not attach content from external resources that are loaded by your Flash files. If your 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 your Flash file.
3. While we are able to index Flash in almost all of the languages found on the web, currently there are difficulties with 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.

I've updated the application DeskTube.  You can now use it to not only view videos and view users' profiles, but you can post comments to videos as well.  I'm working to add feature to upload videos, and other similar functionality to make it a fully functional desktop YouTube application.

If you've already downloaded it, just run it and should automatically update itself.  If you haven't downloaded it, you can install it HERE.  Enjoy!

Flash CS4 sneak peek pictures

Classic 404 error pages are prone to being relatively useless. Whilst a well designed page can provide a means to find what they are looking for, wouldn’t it be great if you could find out more about what went wrong? This tutorial will show you how simple it is to have an explanatory email sent to you whenever a visitor hits a 404 page.

The first thing is to implement a custom 404 error page. Essentially it involves adding the following to your root .htaccess file:

ErrorDocument 404 http://www.yoursite.com/404.php

This will instruct all 404 error requests to be sent to the specified page rather than showing a default message.

The following code needs to be customized and placed anywhere in your 404 php page:

$myemail = "insert your email address here";
$page = 'http://' . $SERVER_NAME . $REQUEST_URI;
$subject = "404 Page Error";
$message = "
404 Page Error Report
Visitor came from: ".$_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER']."
Page not found: ".$page."
";
mail($myemail,$subject,$message,"From: 404errorpage");

This will send you an email which will include (if possible) both the page which the user has been referred from, and the page or resource which couldn’t be found.