On June 30, 2008, Google quietly made one of the largest non announcements the organic search space has seen. It lacked the visibility of “No Luke, I am your Father”, but has elicited the same kind of response from all of the web geeks that I have given the information. For instance, one of our new media strategists, Mike D, said “WHAT!!? HOW!!?”. After a trip to snopes.com turned up nothing, we soon began furiously googling for keywords on full on flash sites to assess the impact. A search on “peasant quest” turned up the mostly flash Videlectrix game portfolio site. The peculiar thing is that similar searches on other game names did not return the site. So like any good team of computer geeks on a mission, we killed a few hours playing Duck Guardian instead of solving the mystery.

Everything we have been told about search engines is about to be flipped on its ear. WOW! Now Google can read and crawl your Flash .swf files, but do not expect Digital shops to start recommending that everything changes to Flash just yet.

While Google may be able to crawl flash the following questions are still shrouded in Googley secrecy

• How much of the site can Google crawl?
• Which pieces is Google indexing?
• What are the most important parts code wise?
• How will results be displayed in a Google search?
• Can Google take you to specific “pages” within a flash app?

Since paging within a Flash application is not as cut and dry as an HTML site, it is not clear that whether Google will be able to find specific pages within the application. In order to judge the impact, we will need Google to provide a text cache for a Flash site. This is unlikely to happen for until the other (hahaha what other?) engines catch up. Until then, it’s a whole lotta test and learn.