Google announced yesterday that is has now developed an algorithm for reading content within Flash Web files. Utilizing Adobe's Flash Player technology, textual content such as Flash menus, buttons and banners, to self-contained Flash Web sites can now be read and indexed by the search engine.

Google previously warned against Flash only sites because search engines were exclusively text-based and couldn't read content contained in Flash files. Google's warning included:

"This means that in order to be crawled and indexed, your content needs to be in text format. This doesn't mean that you can't include images, Flash files, videos, and other rich media content on your site; it just means that any content you embed in these files should also be available in text format or it won't be accessible to search engines."

Google software engineers Ron Adler and Janis Stipins who also serve on the indexing team said that all of the text that users can see as they interact with your Flash file will now be readable by the engine as well.

I'm sure this will be welcome news to Flash Web developers as in the past this has been an inherent flaw of Flash. According to Google, the improvements will automatically take effect and nothing will have to be done to Flash sites to make them readable. Google will automatically begin to index it, up to the limits of our current technical ability and recommends that if there are parts of the site that you do not want indexed (for example, copywrite or "loading" messages,)consider replacing the text within an image, which will make it effectively invisible to Google.

While Adobe is also collaborating with Yahoo! on its Flash reader technology, Yahoo! has not yet implemented the ability to read Flash for indexing purposes although it is certainly on the horizon for the #2 engine.