For too long Google and the other search engines have had difficulty crawling flash sites. When we mean 'crawling the site', the purpose of this is to display a good summary of the site in natural search results. Crawling a site well also means that you achieve your minimum cost per click in paid search; which in turn makes paid search marketers happy.
For those un-intitated to the problem, here's some more information: many retailers have very visual products that require their websites to sell a concept, as well as have the facts that consumers are looking for. They use their site as an online brochure rather than as an online stock inventory.
A prime example is the 'automotive' vertical. Traditionally, these sites are very flash heavy due to their complex interactive and visual nature. However, due to this heavy flash nature the engines can not crawl the content of the site well. Yahoo still has this problem. A simple search for 'vw golf', returns the following:
There is no description in the snippet and the ranking of some links can be lower down than they should be. With the quality score being so important in paid search, the word content on the page is very important to maintain low cost per clicks - and as you can see, Yahoo has not found any words.
Now Google has been the first to improve the crawling of these sites:
Let us hope the other engines follow suit.
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