I just caught this very exciting bit of information regarding Flash in Google searches. Google's indexing Flash text content using Adobe's Search Engine SDK. This is according to an interview Stephen Spencer conducted with Matt Cutts from Google. I haven't found this on any official Google page, but it is more or less from the horses mouth. Here's an excerpt from the interview:

"...it can be difficult to pull the text out a Flash file. I think we do pretty well. It used to be the case that we had our own, home-brew code to pull the text out of Flash, but I think that we have moved to the Search Engine SDK tool that Adobe/Macromedia offers."

This is great news for RIAs and especially Flash/Flex folks who care about search engine ranking. It was always at least a little bit contested if not unclear how and if text and in Flash sites (.swf) got proper treatment from Google. Certainly this has been stated as reason to not adopt Flash for your presentation layer in the past, maybe this will change people's minds a bit. Flex has done a lot to combat two of the other big RIA risk ares of accessibility and bookmarking/back button issues. I'm glad to see real issues like this being resolved with concrete technical solutions. More on accessibility and bookmarking (state) in future posts:)

This is also good because we can avoid techniques that could look like cloaking to Googlebot which will hurt your search engine listings. It is pretty cool that you can download the SDK and test out your content. However on the SDK's FAQ page (which looks a bit dated) it says that Adobe hasn't announced any official 3rd party search engines.

You download the interview in mp3 format or read the transcript for more info.