Great news for Flex developers (and Flex consumers!) - not just from a technical point of view, as this anouncement contains a symbolic character, as well:

Google and Yahoo! anounced SWF searchability!

For those being not familar with Flex, the swf stands for "Shockwave Flash" and is the file extension of applications created with Flex - as executable programs might have a .exe extension for example, Flex applications have .swf.

But unfortunately search engines are not able to search in .swf applications, which means if you have created a beautiful record store Flex application, Google will not come up with any search results referencing your records....not until yesterday!

Adobe anounced in a press release that they are working together with Google and Yahoo! in order to integrate swf contents into their search spiders, which is really great news! And the roll out already started...!

As we think Adobe explained much better what they are doing than we could sum up here, we recommend to read the full press realease here.

But as richability usually tries to let you "feel" applications features and frameworks rather than blogging only, we thought what about a little test? So we created a Mini-Flex app below, the application contains a static label and a dynamic text which is being displayed when clicking a button. From what they wrote in the Adobe press release, both types (static and dynamic Flex content) should be found by a Google/Yahho! spider. As richability.com is a pretty new site, we are aware that the Google spiders currently do not hit our page daily...it's more something between seven and fourteen days, so please don't expect the examples to be found within the next three hours...but with the signal lights we will indicate whether the contents were spidered or not!

So below there is a Flex application and a simple HTML Page which contain "spiderable" content , the SWF file contains the labels "find_Me_I_am_A_Static_Flex_Label_In_A_Swf_File" (static) and "find_Me_I_am_A_Dynamic_Flex_Label_In_A_Swf_File" (dynamic generated when pressing a button); the HTML file contains the content "'find_Me_I_am_A_Static_Html_Label", that's just for comparison as HTML should be found without any difficulties.

Right here we put the links to the applications, which hopefully will cause the spider to follow the links:

http://www.richability.com/infospace/spider/spider.swf

http://www.richability.com/infospace/spider/static.html

What do we expect to see when pressing one of the Google search links below? Well, in case that Google really opened our SWF and read the content we should find at last one Google result when pressing the link - currently there do not appear any links! In a nutshell: if we see a search result when searching for find_Me_I_am_A_Static_Flex_Label_In_A_Swf_File for example, then our test succeeded!

For those who do not want to test the Google query links below we prepared the results with little icons, the red traffic light of course stands for "no results found...".

The static swf link (find_Me_I_am_A_Static_Flex_Label_In_A_Swf_File)
The dynamic swf link (find_Me_I_am_A_Dynamic_Flex_Label_In_A_Swf_File)
The statics HTML link (find_Me_I_am_A_Static_Html_Label)

And now, have fun with this experiment - we are really curious to see the outputs!