Adobe recently announced that Google and Yahoo! (Where’s Microsoft?) will now be able to crawl Flash. From what I can tell this announcement was met with some enthusiasm and some mehs.
Jon Gruber offers the following view:
It’s completely closed and opaque. Adobe is only providing the magic recipe to Google and Yahoo; all other search engines remain locked out.
Adobe to their credit say:
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.
In general I’m a fan of the “develop it, get it out the door, fix it, and get it out the door again” philosophy. But I hope that by “broaden the availability of this capability to benefit all” it means the rest of us dopes get it in short order too.