Adobe announced today that we’ve been working with Google and Yahoo on technology that will allow Flash content, specifically SWF files, to be crawled and indexed by their search engines. Our new searchable SWF technology basically acts like a virtual human in that it moves through your applications, gets data from the server and captures text and data in context, and as such enables search engines to pull out much more meaningful information about the Flash content on a site than they ever could before.

The great thing is that this is retrospective – the millions of SWF files out on the web will be indexed by this new player, and content and app developers don’t have to do anything for their Flash-based sites to be picked up. Google is rolling this out on their production servers right now, and while it will likely take a while for the impact of this to propagate into search results, improvement should start to be seen in weeks. Yahoo doesn’t have this live yet, but is committed to using the technology and releasing it at a later date.

I think this is a really exciting technology release. Dynamic content searchability has been an issue for search engines for years. Flash content is so pervasive on the web, the fact that it couldn’t be thoroughly crawled and indexed in the past kept search engines from being able to access an enormous amount of web content. This will be great for increasing search accuracy over time, particularly as Google and Yahoo apply their secret sauce to the SWF results. This also has major implications for SEO companies, and I can imagine the new work springing up around optimization of Flash content. Many creative agencies have been asking for this for a long time, so we’re thrilled to see Google roll this out.

Ryan Stewart and Justin Everett-Church have great coverage on this, as does the Google Webmaster Central blog.