No, Google and Yahoo still can’t crawl videos, understand what’s going on and point you to, say, the funniest mullet that appears on YouTube.

But they have both announced that they’ve worked with Adobe to come up with ways to read text that’s written on (the growing number of) Flash-based Web sites, so they can index those sites along with ones written in HTML.

The folks at Google explain why you should care:

In the past, web designers faced challenges if they chose to develop a site in Flash because the content they included was not indexable by search engines. They needed to make extra effort to ensure that their content was also presented in another way that search engines could find.

Now that we’ve launched our Flash indexing algorithm, web designers can expect improved visibility of their published Flash content, and you can expect to see better search results and snippets.

Google also has a good Q and A that explains the advance.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 2nd, 2008 at 6:55 am and is filed under General News.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.