Google to crawl Adobe Flash pages

According to the official Google Blog, Google have developed new algorithms to allow their search spider to index Adobe Flash pages. While I do understand that they want to index everything on the web, I’m personally not looking forward to having lots of “skip intro” results in my search results!

Adobe Flash is a great technology and can add great multimedia capabilities to a website. However, “web designers” have taken it and used it to build whole websites with. If you know anything about user interface design then you’ll know having a website which doesn’t use standard conventions that everyone is use to is bad.

Can you cut and paste text on Flash sites? Nope!
Can you deep link into a page? Generally no!
Should websites fill the whole browser viewport and then scale as you change the window size? Nope.

In my opinion, Flash should be used minimally to improve the user experience on the site. Use it to nicely scroll your header images. Use to imbed a music player if you’re a music site. But don’t make me click on a webpage which says “skip intro” because you want to show off the fact you’ve learnt how to rotate some text and image layers from your “Adobe Flash for Dummies” book!

I’m hoping that Google will throw out the crappy Flash results (i.e. “skip intro”) when it parses these websites but I guess we’ll see in the coming weeks and months.