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Comment by superkuh | Hacker News Reader

What I don't understand is why google is intentionally excluding .swf results from search results. Okay, fine, you don't want it in Chrome that's your choice. But not indexing .swf in your search engine product because you don't support it in your browser product is crazy. It's going out of their way, doing more work, to hurt people.

I guess this is just another example of being unable to count on profit motivated corporations. It's a good thing the IA is trying to help.

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They are not supported in most browsers. Most users are going to have a bad experience if they load a page with Flash, and it makes sense to down-rank pages that will deliver a bad experience.

Most file types are not supported in browsers. Only a few are. A "download file" dialog is not a bad experience. Treating .swf like a normal file type would both be easier and better in all ways.

Flash will not be supported in any of the large browsers after December, limiting access to people who go out of their way to use both a fork that preserves NPAPI or whatever Chromium uses and manually install some version of Flash.

I'm not aware of any search engines that index arbitrary files that the browser or some ubiquitous media viewer can't open. The most annoying I can think of is the occasional powerpoint files I've run across on google, and at least those are usually cached in a browser-friendly format.

It'd be like indexing Adobe CS project files, and requiring a subscription to Adobe to open the search result.

There is a binary, Windows-native SWF player that still works 100% perfectly on Win 10. There is also one for OSX but with Apple's hatred for backwards compatibility I have no idea whether it still works or not

It's a shame that Adobe has all but buried it, but it does work.

Honestly its the only good way to view downloaded flash content nowadays, because it preserves all the hyperlinks and other nonlinearity that is lost on conversion to a video file. Strongbad emails, for example, have tons of hidden content activated by clicking hotspots during playback. (You can even hunt for them by hitting Tab)

For macOS iSwiff ( https://echoone.com/iswiff/ ). Should hopefully work until the end of time

> Most file types are not supported in browsers

And does Google index/show any of them in a search result? You usually have to get them indirectly from pages, but the search links themselves never directly link to any unsupported file type AFAIK

I think you're right. Weird text formats like filetype:cpp work fine, but filetype:bmp does not, and that could be considered analogous to swf.

And even then I think only when it's being served with "content-type: text/plain", which the browser clearly supports.

In fact, Google used to index Flash files and marked the corresponding search results with "[swf]", similar to how they do with PDF files now. I don't recall at what point in time they stopped doing that.

[Edit] A quick search reveals that Google stopped indexing SWF files fairly recently: https://searchengineland.com/google-to-stop-indexing-flash-c...

What would Google index? Can you even decipher the contents of a SWF to get keywords out of it?

Yes, Adobe publishes SWF specs. You can extract text, links, pictures, etc. out.

Yes, Adobe released an SDK (which Google used) to allow indexing content in SWF files. However, it looks like Google no longer uses it, or indexes them.

All major browsers have sunset support for Flash and it's moved behind increasingly strict warnings over the years. Since Google Search is a web application, there's not much value in giving people content they can't use.

I can download Linux ISOs and video as as MKVs just fine to use or play them on my PC outside the walls of the web browser just fine.

Do you expect Google to return a .ISO file when you search for “debian linux” or do you get a web page with a link to the ISO?

No, but with power point files and word documents I do?

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