Google, Yahoo and Adobe have just announced that they have worked together to enable search results to crawl not only HTML, but also Flash files. Interesting news indeed. For years now web builders have had to build two sites in parallel if they use Flash - one for the users, and one for the search engines that preferred eating text in HTML form.

Now this raises a few interesting questions. First up, what will happen to the search results while Google and Yahoo work out how to rank and rate Flash content? No Flash designer has ever had to consider the SEO effects of their Flash coding so surely there must be some pretty badly constructed Flash content out there, at least in terms of what Google is used to seeing. Secondly, are we really excited to see lots of Flash enabled intros for boring, company sites showing up when we search? Probably not - that's why 'skip intro' will soon be the most hated, yet competitive term on Google. Finally, now that Flash folk won't have to create HTML versions of their sites for SEO purposes - will they still remember to do so for partially sighted visitors? Text to speech browsers are not highly optimized for reading Flash, and although in the UK this audience is supported by legislation this is not the case globally. Perhaps Adobe will also release their Flash 'search reading' software to other companies that make text to speech browsers to help them out there - unless Google just offers it as an API of course. Click here to Skip intro.

Labels: Flash, Google, SEO, Yahoo

An article from Canada's Globe and Mail talks about some of the data privacy concerns facing Gmail users outside the US. Canada, like the UK and other countries outside of the US, has strong data protection laws for individuals. Canadian companies are required by law to keep user's data private, and inform their users should any access occur. However Google is based in the US, and thus falls under the remit of the ever more evil and invasive US PATRIOT Act which allows the US Authorities to monitor, read and laugh at pretty much any email communication on a server in their jurisdiction.

Companies that use Google's corporate services to provide email and other capabilities to their employees could be falling foul of a mix of international regulations. This either makes their use of Google's services untenable going forward, or maybe Google just needs to start fragmenting into localized companies to deal with this issue. I'm not sure if just hosting the mail servers in each country mitigates the legal issues, or whether the parent company being US based is the main requirement, but I suspect that overseas servers would at least make the US enforcement services need to get a warrant of some kind for suspected 'terrorists' rather than 'all you can eat' data access for the 99.9999999% of innocent people in the US.

Labels: Email, Google, International, Legal Issues

Hitwise ran an interesting article yesterday about the difference in demographic between users of Yahoo and Google. They analysed a range of statistics, and their results indicated a couple of interesting points - firstly that Google users tend to skew slightly older (centering around 35-44 rather than Yahoo's 25-34), and secondly that Google tends to be favoured by people who have spent over $500 online. In principle what this means is if you have a cheap product advertise on Yahoo, a more expensive product then advertise on Google to get better results.

You can read the whole article here.