Hacker News Reader

Comment by ben0x539 | Hacker News Reader

Oof. Organizing the world's information, except the information that's unfortunately stuck in a file format we don't like anymore (for good reasons), that knowledge clearly isn't worth anything. I get disabling Flash support in browsers by default, but actively pretending Flash content doesn't exist so no one can find it anymore seems unnecessarily destructive.

View on HN

Google operates on a live-code model. Anything running requires some level of active maintenance and support, so there's always incentive to trim. In this case, the Flash crawler is an obvious thing to trim (what's the point of indexing something that the average user lacks the tools to open and read?).

One thing I do wish they would / could do in situations like this though is open-source the core of that crawler, so if someone else finds a purpose for it, they could run their own on whatever corpus they care to index. But, such is the price of relying on closed-source software for things.

Information is still information. Sure I hate having to deal with flash, but if that information I need is nowhere on the web except this one flash or pdf deep down the interwebs, I will take a look.

I'm all for downranking it to the last page, but when your google results only has 2 pages total, every single result matters, including that flash content.

Who is paying to maintain the codebase to dissect Flash as the libraries it depends on change?

It's also kind of meaningless to show you search results that point to a flash file your browser can't handle.

I hope they meant just parsing swf-files or extracting their meta-data. Purging anything related to the file itself would be quite counter productive for a search engine.

They're not getting rid of their existing indexes of Flash data, are they?

It's kind of odd for a web search to index information that your browser can't display. Although I suppose paywall sites and book search are similar.

Yeah, it's not great. I figure not being able to display specific things is something people who really need to can work around, but not even being able to find things means surrendering information to the void.

Google indexes plenty of other binary filetypes.

Just because one can't open the information by default doesn't mean the information doesn't exist - in this case, Flash content is exactly like your paywall and book examples. The searcher can decide if having access to the information is worth the added cost...regardless of it's buying the book, paying for the subscription to bypass the paywall, finding an old computer or setting up a VM to use flash.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com