Flash Gains Instant Visibility Through FAST

We wondered how Fast pulled the TITLE and description for the search engine listings for Flash pages. We assumed these elements would come from the original HTML document's <TITLE> and meta description tags, simply converting any Flash on the page to HTML, with this data added to the index in addition to the HTML page content.

But what if the Flash site wasn't embedded in an HTML document, and was just a .swf file? Where would Fast get its listing title and description?

We got answers from FAST engineer Rolf Michelsen, who confirmed our inital assumptions were correct. "When the Flash file is embedded as part of a HTML document, we use the document title and various heuristics to extract title and teaser for our search results. The heuristics for extracting a teaser may use the meta description tag if present," said Michelsen.

"When indexing a stand-alone Flash file, we extract title and teaser directly from the Flash file -- basically trying to compose a teaser from the first few sentences of text extracted from the Flash file," concluded Michelsen.

So there you have it -- from the horse's mouth. This makes the critical point that designers should always embed their .swf Flash files in an HTML document and add a <TITLE>, meta description, and meta keywords tags to ensure their Flash based pages will be indexed in the search engines with a title and description of which they approve. Otherwise, the listing may show "No Title," and the description will be the first text indexed in the file, which may not be advantageous.