Google Learns to Crawl Flash Sites!!!!! July 2, 2008
Posted by Virtual Assistant in Interent Marketing, Internet Marketing, Web 3.0, web design.Tags: adobe flash, crawling sites, flash, flash graphics, google, Google crawlers, search engines
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I am soo excited about this news! If you have any sort of flash on your site you will be excited too! Check out the post I read…
We’ve received numerous requests to improve our indexing of Adobe Flash files. Today, Ron Adler and Janis Stipins—software engineers on our indexing team—will provide us with more in-depth information about our recent announcement that we’ve greatly improved our ability to index Flash.
Q: Which Flash files can Google better index now?
We’ve improved our ability to index textual content in SWF files of all kinds. This includes Flash “gadgets” such as buttons or menus, self-contained Flash websites, and everything in between.
Q: What content can Google better index from these Flash files?
All of the text that users can see as they interact with your Flash file. If your website contains Flash, the textual content in your Flash files can be used when Google generates a snippet for your website. Also, the words that appear in your Flash files can be used to match query terms in Google searches.
In addition to finding and indexing the textual content in Flash files, we’re also discovering URLs that appear in Flash files, and feeding them into our crawling pipeline—just like we do with URLs that appear in non-Flash webpages. For example, if your Flash application contains links to pages inside your website, Google may now be better able to discover and crawl more of your website.
Q: What about non-textual content, such as images?
At present, we are only discovering and indexing textual content in Flash files. If your Flash files only include images, we will not recognize or index any text that may appear in those images. Similarly, we do not generate any anchor text for Flash buttons which target some URL, but which have no associated text.
Also note that we do not index FLV files, such as the videos that play on YouTube, because these files contain no text elements.
Q: How does Google “see” the contents of a Flash file?
We’ve developed an algorithm that explores Flash files in the same way that a person would, by clicking buttons, entering input, and so on. Our algorithm remembers all of the text that it encounters along the way, and that content is then available to be indexed. We can’t tell you all of the proprietary details, but we can tell you that the algorithm’s effectiveness was improved by utilizing Adobe’s new Searchable SWF library.
Q: What do I need to do to get Google to index the text in my Flash files?
Basically, you don’t need to do anything. The improvements that we have made do not require any special action on the part of web designers or webmasters. If you have Flash content on your website, we will automatically begin to index it, up to the limits of our current technical ability (see next question).
That said, you should be aware that Google is now able to see the text that appears to visitors of your website. If you prefer Google to ignore your less informative content, such as a “copyright” or “loading” message, consider replacing the text within an image, which will make it effectively invisible to us.
Q: What are the current technical limitations of Google’s ability to index Flash?
There are three main limitations at present, and we are already working on resolving them:
1. Googlebot does not execute some types of JavaScript. So if your web page loads a Flash file via JavaScript, Google may not be aware of that Flash file, in which case it will not be indexed.
2. We currently do not attach content from external resources that are loaded by your Flash files. If your Flash file loads an HTML file, an XML file, another SWF file, etc., Google will separately index that resource, but it will not yet be considered to be part of the content in your Flash file.
3. While we are able to index Flash in almost all of the languages found on the web, currently there are difficulties with Flash content written in bidirectional languages. Until this is fixed, we will be unable to index Hebrew language or Arabic language content from Flash files.
We’re already making progress on these issues, so stay tuned!
You’ve Heard of Web 2.0 But What About Web 3.0!? May 15, 2008
Posted by Virtual Assistant in Marketing, Productivity Coaching, Virtual Services, Web 2.0, Web 3.0, Web Marketing, small business, web design.Tags: enth, future, innovations, internet, semantic, semantic search, twine, web, Web 2.0, Web 3.0, web design, Web Marketing, website magazine, zoominfo
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As a virtual professional providing web services I am constantly reading and learning about the web and how changes will be taking place in the near future. I have completely submersed myself in the Web 2.0 innovations and have recently learned about Web 3.0!
It is so important that you understand this future growth because these particular changes will change the way customers will search and reach your website and will require new ways to design and market your website!
Based on Website Magazine “…Web 3.0 or Semantic Web is about meaning — understanding the context of a word or concept to offer relevant resources, there by making it easier for people to find what they seek.”
As the internet grows it is so very hard to find what you are searching for so the next obvious growth will be to provide a smarter search. Right now the search engines give you results that match the words you type into their search. A “Semantic” search will be able to intelligently understand the context of your search phrase or word and provide results that correctly match. By providing smarter search intelligence in the search engines consumers will be able to ask for exactly what they are looking for. As a web designer we will need to incorporate this into the design. Right now websites are designed with top keywords and keyphrases within the website topic. Now websites will need to incorporate an even more tailored topic to insure inclusion in the most detailed search!
Website Magazine gives us five suggestions on how we can prepare:
“What can be done today and how do we prepare for tomorrow? Here are five suggestions:
1. Connect with the right people. Imagine your company has a product that takes advantage of mobile telephony for use in automobiles. And, one of your most promising conversations was with an executive at an automotive company who previously worked in the telecommunications industry. With technology like ZoomInfo, you might be able to build a list of executives who meet that profile. That hasn’t been possible before. Available Today.
2. Make industry data available for public inquiry. Using the power of ENTH or a similar technology enables people to find relationships in your data that you might not have otherwise found. The benefit is the association of your brand as the source of helpful information. Available Today.
3. Educate semantic search engines by defining your commercial space to ontology engines like WordNet from Princeton University (WordNet.Princeton.edu). As an example, Fender Guitar Company may want to teach the semantic search engines that Fender manufactures acoustic and electric guitars, and within the electric guitar category is the Stratocaster, Telecaster, etc. The idea is when somebody searches for “Best Electric Guitar,” the search engine might find a blog where a guitarist claims his Stratocaster is the best guitar ever made. A semantic search engine, like Powerset, would understand a reference to a Stratocaster as “best” is related to the search for “Best Electric Guitar.” It would know the Stratocaster is an electric guitar and a user says it’s the best. Available Today.
4. Create landing pages to welcome visitors who represent market segments most likely to visit your website. A common example is a competitive shopper – someone visiting the websites of your competitors and, more importantly, browsing specific categories, products or services. If you knew they were comparing your product or service to a specific competitor’s, how could you greet them to be more persuasive in the sales process? Detect visitors that match those specific market segments when they arrive and display the corresponding landing page. Available Today.
5. When Twine launches this spring, companies will be able to create “twines” around commercial topics. This puts them at the heart of conversations about their commercial space. It will also be important to establish a Semantic Graph for your company. I am seeing Semantic Graphs as a form of digital fingerprint. It might be the new way to express your brand. So people with certain attributes are attracted to companies that cater to those attributes. Available Summer 2008.”
-Website Magazine’s “The Semantic Web” Full Article
Here is a list of Semantic Search Engines as provided by Wikipedia:
Examples of semantic web search engines include:
- Semantic Web Search Engine (SWSE) Developed by DERI Ireland.
- Sindice Developed by DERI Ireland.
- Watson Developed by KMi, UK.
- Yahoo! Microsearch
- Falcons Developed by IWS China.
- Semantic Web Search Developed by Intellidimension Inc.
- Zitgist Search
- Swoogle Developed by the Ebiquity Group of UMBC, USA.
- Semantic Email Search Developed by IBM Research
Examples of health domain specific semantic search engines:
- Curbside.MD Developed by Praxeon
- Semantic Health Search Developed by CureHunter Inc., entity extraction and relationship network
