Download Squad

Google crawls Flash

One of (but certainly not the only) the reasons that designing Flash-based websites has gone out of favor in the last few years is because search engines, by and large, could not index Flash. It is pretty hard to achieve any sort of SEO if the search engine doesn't see your content to begin with.

But good news for Flash developers! Thanks to Adobe's new Searchable SWF library, Google can now "see" and index the textual content in Flash files. Text from buttons, menus, descriptions and anything else are now better indexed by Google, in the same way traditional HTML is indexed. URLs embedded in Flash files are also now crawled in the same way as regular non-Flash sites. Non-textual content like images and FLV files will not be indexed.

Google's Webmaster Centeral Blog has more information as to the potential limitations and webmaster best practices for this improved technology, so if you are a Flash developer, check it out!

[via Official Google Blog]

AdSense Referrals and AdWords pay-per-action retired

As part of the DoubleClick acquisition, Google is retiring two of its referral products, AdSense Referrals and AdWords pay-per-action, during the last week of August 2008.

DoubleClick's Perforics Affiliate Network is being rebranded as the Google Affiliate Network and it will serve as a replacement for AdSense Referrals and AdWords pay-per-action. Google's Conversion Optimizer will replace pay-per-action's CPA (cost-per-acquisition) tool.

[via Inside Adsense and Inside AdWords]

Is Picasa being rebranded?

Google Operating System has uncovered references to the name "Google Photos" in Picasa Web's code that suggests that service might be changing names. Picasa, Google's photo management service that pales in comparison to Flickr in both features and community, has always had a bit of a branding problem. Would Google Photos be better? It certainly spells out what the service is in a much more concise manner. As Google Operating System points out, the service's blog is already called the "Google Photos Blog" and there is a Google Photos screensaver. A full rebranded effort would bring cohesion to the product.

[via Google Operating System]

Google teams up with Seth MacFarlane

"Family Guy" creator Seth MacFarlane has just signed a distribution deal with Google for his new web-exclusive animated-short series, "Seth MacFarlane's Cavalcade of Cartoon Comedy." The series, which will be rolled out in 50 2-minute installments, is going to be syndicated via AdSense and will run in the "ad block" on sites predetermined to be part of MacFarlane's target audience.

Advertising will exist either through pre-roll clips, banners at the bottom of the screen or "brought to you by" messages. This is the first high-profile original content production that will be distributed by the Google Content Network. With a multimillion-dollar production budget, "Cavalcade" represents one of the biggest Internet content deals in history.

[via The New York Times]

Google Mac Playground

As a Mac users, I sometimes feel shafted by Google because so many of their non-cloud services are Windows or Linux only. Where's the OS X love? Well, the Google Mac Blog reminded us of the Google Mac Developer Playground, which is a collection of all of Google's developed and developing Mac projects.

The Google Toolbox for Mac has just be updated and new tools like Vidnik, which lets you record a movie from your iSight and upload it straight to YouTube (yes, iMovie can do this too -- but at least Google is making the effort) have been introduced.

Maybe Google has some Mac love after all.

[via Google Mac Blog]

Farewell, Googlified

Googleholic would just like to take a moment to thank Haochi Chen for all the hard work he put into his Googlified blog over the years. Haochi has decided to stop updating Googlified, because of time constraints. Googlified has consistently been a great source of Google information and commentary and we wish Haochi the best of luck with his future projects!