Google to stop indexing Flash for search

[Karlston]

Google to stop indexing Flash for search

With browser makers already putting the kibosh on the once-popular multimedia format, Google search is about to deliver something of a coup de grace.

Rob van der Meijden (CC0)

 

Google on Monday announced that it will soon stop indexing Flash content for its search engine, effectively throwing an invisibility cloak over that content.

 

"Google Search will stop supporting Flash later this year," Dong-Hwi Lee, an engineering manager, wrote in a post to the company's Webmaster Central blog. "In Web pages that contain Flash content, Google Search will ignore the Flash content. [And] Google Search will stop indexing standalone .swf files."

 

The .swf extension marks Flash animation files.

 

Minus indexing, searches for Flash content will come up empty. If Google doesn't index it, in other words, does it exist? For the vast majority on the web - analytics vendor Net Applications said Google accounted for 75% of global search activity last month - that would be a no.

Flash, on the way out

Adobe laid out Flash's demise two years ago when it disclosed that it would stop updating and distributing Flash Player at the end of 2020. At the same time, browser makers revealed how they were going to sunset the player software and thus put an end to the multimedia format.

 

Google, for example, disabled Flash by default in Chrome 76, the version that debuted in July. (Users can manually turn on the Flash Player, as can IT admins through group policies.) Come Chrome 87 - currently slated for a December 2020 release - the browser won't run Flash at all.

 

Mozilla's Firefox also recently met a major Flash milestone: As of September's Firefox 69, the browser required the user to approve every request to run Flash.

 

Shutting down Flash indexing will impact only a fraction of all websites: According to technology survey site W3Techs, only 3% of sites now utilize Flash code. That number climbs when more popular sites are polled; 8.4% of the top-1,000 sites, said W3Techs, contain Flash code.

 

 

Source: Google to stop indexing Flash for search (Computerworld - Gregg Keizer)

[steven36]

It’s been a long time coming, but Flash should be completely dead by December 2020.

 

 

Flash was impressive back in the day. Games, animations and interactive elements were right there in your browser. But as the internet matured, Flash did not. In fact, it became a nuisance and a security risk. Adobe, which owns Flash, announced that it would end support for the technology by December 2020, and now Google says Search will no longer index Flash content or Shockwave Flash files in the coming weeks.

 

The goal of Google Search is to prioritize the best content that's relevant to your query. Since Flash content used to be a draw, Search would give points to pages featuring the technology, similar to how pages with YouTube embeds are rewarded today. But as HTML5 has taken the torch, Flash has become less relevant, to put it lightly. The mere mention of the long-in-the-tooth plug-in induces eye rolls, and the biggest web browsers, including Microsoft Edge, Chrome, Firefox and Safari, all now block Flash content by default.

 

The change to Search will have little to no effect on users. The move is more of a signal to developers to get with the times and start using more modern technology to make their sites more useful. The odd thing is that it's taken so long for tech leaders to sunset Flash. Google required users to upload banner ads as SWF files in its Ads platform (formerly called Adwords) as recently as 2016, six years after Steve Jobs trashed the technology in his open letter, "Thoughts on Flash".

 

Flash served as a huge stepping stone in the development of rich media, but it's time for everyone to move on. There's a nice farm upstate where Flash can relax and enjoy life.

 

More at: Google

 

Source

[Karlston]

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