Flash Files (Not Flash Video) Get Search

Adobe, Google and Yahoo have announced they are banding together to enable searches through Flash content, but the service won’t index FLV files — meaning no new way to search YouTube videos. Perfecting video search seems to be a nagging issue for the industry, but it also could just be a solution looking for a problem.

According to the Google Webmaster Central Blog, the new Ado-Goo-Hoo search functionality discovers and indexes textual content and URLs within Flash files. FLV files are not indexed because there are no text elements in these files. An Adobe senior product manager told InfoWorld that video search capabilities could be added at some point.

Video search has never really broken through into the mainstream. It’s difficult to develop and no real need has been established for it. In May, Video search engine Truveo offered a $100,000 prize for developers to help it come up with new search applications. And earlier this year, the 1st Annual Video Search Summit was an anemic affair that perhaps all-too-well captured the unfortunate zeitgeist of the state of video search.

But as Liz pointed out, maybe the quest for better video search is moot. With YouTube dominating so much of the online video we watch, we can easily limit our searches to its library. And stuff that lives outside the video site (or in addition to it) will typically have its own memorable URLs like ABC.com or something like theallfornots.com.