I'm not a huge fan of creating sites with Adobe's Flash.  I personally find Flash sites difficult to navigate, bookmark, and retrieve worthwhile information.  However, I can understand why the more artistic Web designers and site owners out there prefer to use Flash when building a website.  But in my mind, one of the biggest drawbacks with Flash is that Google and other search engines have a difficult time reading and indexing Flash sites.  Let's face it, if Google can't search your site then it is highly unlikely your customers will find your site in the first few pages displayed by Google no matter which keywords are being used.

Luckily for Flash fans, Google has changed the rules by improving their search capability for Flash sites.

Google has been developing a new algorithm for indexing textual content in Flash files of all kinds, from Flash menus, buttons and banners, to self-contained Flash websites. Recently, we've improved the performance of this Flash indexing algorithm by integrating Adobe's Flash Player technology.

In the past, web designers faced challenges if they chose to develop a site in Flash because the content they included was not indexable by search engines. They needed to make extra effort to ensure that their content was also presented in another way that search engines could find.

So there you have it.  I just lost my number one argument against building a site using Flash technology.  Web designers and site owners will likely want to read Google's questions and answers pertaining to the improvements with Flash indexing.

Gadgetopia: "Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft have gotten together and actually agreed on extensions to the REP — the Robots Exclusion Protocol, otherwise known as your robots.txt file."

Complete Story

BusinessWeek: There's been no shortage of opinions on the failed takeover as bloggers offer plenty of advice for CEOs Yang and Ballmer—plus a few laughs.

Complete Story

eWeek: Yahoo's CTO offers a bold, promising glimpse of the future of the portal as a social network ... just as Microsoft prepares to move in.

Complete Story

This is why I'm very cautious in using any type of search engine toolbar (Google, Yahoo, etc).

Google is working to fix a bug in the Google Toolbar that could allow criminals to steal data or install malicious software
on a system, a security researcher warned Tuesday.

The flaw lies in the mechanism Google Toolbar
uses to add new buttons on the browser. Because the toolbar does not
perform adequate checks when new buttons are being installed, a hacker
could make his button appear as though it was being downloaded from a
legitimate site when in fact it came from somewhere else.

More information can be found at InfoWorld.

"Under CEO Jerry Yang's direction, the Web portal is trying to return to its tech roots and shift away from being a media catch-all"

Complete Story

"eZ Systems is aggressively expanding and enhancing its flagship product, eZ Publish, with a new extension, enhanced features and compatibility with PHP 5 - while maintaining a smooth upgrade path for existing eZ Publish sites.

...eZ Find, a new extension for eZ Publish 3.x and 4.x, enhances the search functionality on eZ Publish sites and includes features such as relevance ranking, native support for eZ Publish access rights, keyword highlighting and the ability to search sites containing millions of objects."

Complete Story

"Yahoo is making important improvements to the user interface and the output of its search engine. It will now suggest complete search queries for you as you type. It makes entering queries a lot faster and improves the likelihood that you'll spell your query correctly. Google offers a similar feature in its downloadable add-on, Google Toolbar, but not yet on its Web site."

Complete Story