Technology

Google to stop indexing Flash content in its search engine; what are new options for website owners

Search engine giant Google announces to stop indexing Flash based content in its search engine index. Google announces on Monday, to stop the indexing of Flash content in search engine index. This means no Flash content will be available for search in Google Search engine result. According to the official post on the Google blog by an engineering manager Dong-Hwi Lee, “Google Search will stop supporting Flash later this year.” Post further added that the Flash content in the website will be ignored before indexing the HTML content in search engine index.

Flash is a technologies from Adobe for developing animation, applications and video player for web browsers. This technology was introduced early in 2000 as browser plugin.

In recent time many new technologies such Ajax, JavaScript and HTML5 have been developed to develop dynamic websites/web applications. So, in recent times there is very less use of Flash and most of the applications is being developed is with the use of latest technologies. So, this move by Google is good to keep its search engine updated with the technology changes.

Flash was introduced in early 2000 to develop interactive web applications for Internet and Intranet. Science then it is being used for creating animation, applications and many other Internet applications. It is to be noted that 2 years back Adobe announced to stop development and distribution of Flash at the end of 2020. To keep up with the latest trend and to remove old technologies Google finally announced to stop indexing Flash based content/applications.

Google will also disable Flash by default in the Chrome 76 version in July. But user will be able to enable the Flash content on their wish. So, it is going to be the end of Flash technologies and no further updates will be available after 2020.

These days most of the websites are using latest technologies and this will affect very small portion of the website on the Internet. According to W3Techs survey, only 3% of websites on the Internet is using Flash, so very less number of websites will be affected. But if we see the top website then over 8% of top website is still using Flash content.

Google post further suggested the web masters to update their website to new technologies and remove the Flash content. Latest HTML5, JavaScript and Ajax based technologies can be used to replace the Flash based content/applications.

Google is de-indexing Flash based content, now applications such as animations, games, video players, audio players and many such flash based content will be removed from Google Search engine index. Further Google will ignore Flash based content if it finds on the website while crawling the web sites.

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Sangita Roy
Sangita Roy is technical editor with 9 years of experience in reporting, editing and packaging new reports. Her interest is technical writing, editing, reporting and writing columns for many media house.
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