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Google licensed the Adobe Flash text extraction library. Using the library it was easy to extract text and links. * Google Now Crawling And Indexing Flash Cont

by frik 12y ago

Google licensed the Adobe Flash text extraction library. Using the library it was easy to extract text and links. * Google Now Crawling And Indexing Flash Content (2008): http://searchengineland.com/google-now-crawling-and-indexing-flash-content-14299 http://searchengineland.com/google-now-crawling-and-indexing... * Adobe page: https://web.archive.org/web/20080702135702/http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flashplayer/articles/swf_searchability.html https://web.archive.org/web/20080702135702/http://www.adobe.... Adobe is working with Google and Yahoo! to enable one of the largest fundamental improvements in web search results by making the Flash file format (SWF) a first- class citizen in searchable web content. Google uses the Adobe Flash Player technology to run SWF content for their search engines to crawl and provide the logic that chooses how to walk through a SWF. Edit: parent commenter edited/changed his text quite a bit, originally it was about Flash content

callmeed 12y ago
Yeah, but this didn't work for dynamic content inside of Flash (i.e. the swf loading image or text content from a server-side API).
KMag 12y ago
Google engineer Ran Adler (sometimes he spells his first name Ron to avoid confusing English speakers) deserves most of the credit here. He went to Adobe with a proposal for the hooks into the Flash player that he needed and worked with their engineers to get those hooks working. I don't doubt there was a fair amount of work on Adobe's side, too, but it wasn't like Adobe had the technology in place before Ran started working with them. Ran came up with an API for the hooks he needed that didn't give away too much of the most clever parts of what he was doing. The belief was that Google would get the hooks it wanted and in return, Adobe could share the special Flash player with other major search engines and everyone would be indexing Flash content. The hope was that Google would just be doing it a bit more cleverly than the competition. I'm not sure if any of the other major search engines ever used the hooks Ran designed. Source: I worked on Google's rich content indexing team from 2006 to 2010. Ran worked mostly on Flash indexing and I worked mostly on JavaScript indexing.
- cpeterso 12y ago
  Within Adobe, this project was codenamed "Ichabod" because it was a "headless" (no rendering) Flash Player. :)

by frik 12y ago

callmeed 12y ago

Yeah, but this didn't work for dynamic content inside of Flash (i.e. the swf loading image or text content from a server-side API).

KMag 12y ago

Google engineer Ran Adler (sometimes he spells his first name Ron to avoid confusing English speakers) deserves most of the credit here. He went to Adobe with a proposal for the hooks into the Flash player that he needed and worked with their engineers to get those hooks working. I don't doubt there was a fair amount of work on Adobe's side, too, but it wasn't like Adobe had the technology in place before Ran started working with them. Ran came up with an API for the hooks he needed that didn't give away too much of the most clever parts of what he was doing. The belief was that Google would get the hooks it wanted and in return, Adobe could share the special Flash player with other major search engines and everyone would be indexing Flash content. The hope was that Google would just be doing it a bit more cleverly than the competition. I'm not sure if any of the other major search engines ever used the hooks Ran designed. Source: I worked on Google's rich content indexing team from 2006 to 2010. Ran worked mostly on Flash indexing and I worked mostly on JavaScript indexing.

cpeterso 12y ago
Within Adobe, this project was codenamed "Ichabod" because it was a "headless" (no rendering) Flash Player. :)