This week Google announced improvements to it's indexing of Flash files. It seems Adobe did most of the work with the actual Flash files for them, and it all sounds quite clever:

We've developed an algorithm that explores Flash files in the same way that a person would, by clicking buttons, entering input, and so on. Our algorithm remembers all of the text that it encounters along the way, and that content is then available to be indexed. We can't tell you all of the proprietary details, but we can tell you that the algorithm's effectiveness was improved by utilizing Adobe's new Searchable SWF library.

The downside of this, for those of us who prefer the web with more substance than Flash, is that one of the easy arguments for persuading non-technical folk not to do a website all in Flash now has less weight - "this will merely encourage those who think that every Web site needs to be a multimedia extravaganza" as one reddit commentator eloquently put it.