Adobe Systems, Inc. has solved, perhaps the largest issue of their extremely popular Flash format, its visibility. To the client, Flash has long popular due to its extreme eye appeal. However, to internet marketers, Flash has been a nightmare due to seach engines inability to see Flash files.

After a decade of waiting, Adobe released a customized version of its Flash Player that has allowed Google to index flash files. At this point in time, Google is still unable able to see anything that is image related, including text embedded in the images.  However according to ArsTechnica,

'Google is able to index the SWF files like that included in Flash gadgets, buttons, menus, entirely self-contained Flash web sites, "and everything in between." Google can now also follow URLs embedded within Flash files to add to the crawling pipeline. This new indexing technology does not, however, include FLV files (video files that are found on sites like YouTube) because those are generated as videos and don't contain any text elements like an SWF file does.'

Yahoo is just behind Google with this new technology. According to Adobe, they will have to work with each search engine individually to implement tools that will work with their specific algorithms. So just where is Microsoft? No one is quite sure if it was a voluntary or involuntary decision to opt-out of this project. However, it is just one more factor that will have Microsoft's search engine sitting at the number three spot.

It is still to be seen just how this will affect search engine results. According to Google and Adobe, there are no on-site updates necessary to have such pages indexed and the tools have already been implemented. It is probably unlikely that Flash websites will overtake the search results, however, it is definitely a step in the right direction.