Google Inc. earlier this year appeared to begin indexing Flash using its own SDK, but that effort has appeared to be on again, off again, Markel said.

Tim Mayer, director of product management for search at Yahoo Inc., said that Yahoo does not spider into Flash content for its Web index but could once it “helps our comprehensiveness.”

Multimedia sites, though, can use Yahoo’s paid inclusion program, Overture Site Match, to feed the content into its index.

“At this point, if you’re using Flash you rarely are going to get a No. 1 listing, and that’s a shame,” Mayer said.

There are movements into investigating a way to abstract the content and presentation layers of Flash sites so that search engines can spider the HTML that they favor and sites can take advantage of the multimedia and interactivity features of Flash. Stay tuned …

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