Update: Read Google's coverage of the event here.

Adobe announced this evening that they're working with Yahoo! and Google to make Flash content more searchable.

Both companies have been given a special version of the flash player that can crawl swfs and automatically perform user actions. The crawler looks for text to make available for search and for url's it uses for it's indexing and page rank systems.



Adobe explains why this effort is significant:

"Until now it has been extremely challenging to search the millions of RIAs and dynamic content on the web, so we are leading the charge in improving search of content that runs in Adobe Flash Player. We are initially working with Google and Yahoo! to significantly improve search of this rich content on the web, and we intend to broaden the availability of this capability to benefit all content publishers, developers, and end users"

Adobe evangelist and blogger-at-large Ryan Stewart sums up the advantages to developers of Flash content with this:

"Google is going to have their own rules for how this new Flash Player indexes and uses the content. So will Yahoo. But we’ve given the search engines the technology to see SWF files in the same way they see HTML files. So now the art (or black voodoo magic) of SEO optimization can come to SWF files as well. That means it’s a big new world for Flash developers. You can poke the system, see what works and what doesn’t work. See how Google will handle deep linking and URL changes in Flash. It’s all up for grabs and it’s really exciting to think about what the Flash community can discover about SEOing SWF files."

This is obviously great news for Flash content developers everywhere. Search-ability is a huge issue and has been a great limitation in Flash to date, but it seems those days are drawing to an end, my friends.

Expect more content on specific deep-linking strategies for Flash in the coming weeks and months, but for now Adobe recommends these general deep-linking strategies to get started.