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Google Privacy Security The Internet

Google Search To Stop Indexing Flash Content in Late 2019 (venturebeat.com) 46

Posted by msmash from the end-of-road dept.
Google has announced that it will stop indexing Flash content in Search as the internet prepares to bid a (not so fond) farewell to the multimedia software platform next year. From a report: "In web pages that contain Flash content, Google Search will ignore the Flash content," said Google engineering manager Dong-Hwi Lee in a blog post. "Google Search will stop indexing standalone SWF files." It is no secret that Adobe Flash is well and truly on its way out -- two years ago, a consortium of internet companies (including Adobe itself) committed to killing Flash by 2020. Preceding that, Steve Jobs' famous Thoughts on Flash letter from 2010 helped set the wheels in motion for the proprietary software's eventual demise, with the Apple cofounder citing numerous reasons why his company's hardware would not support Flash, including performance on mobile and poor security.
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Google Search To Stop Indexing Flash Content in Late 2019 More

Google Search To Stop Indexing Flash Content in Late 2019

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  • Feh (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Presence Eternal ( 56763 )

    Hating flash is like hating paper because most of what is written on paper is advertising and lies. Oceans of wonderful content were made with or had their origins in flash. If you care about the good stuff, you might look up Bluemaxima's Flashpoint.

    • Look at my Horse, my horse is amazing is among my favorite flash content. Mostly because I can use it to drive my wife up a wall.

    • Also the security problems were no different and had the same solutions as a million other scripting engines still in use today.

    • People hate flash not because of the content but because it causes a lot of problems. At one point, Flash was responsible for over 80% of all browser crashes.

      • Re:Feh (Score:4, Insightful)

        by pecosdave ( 536896 ) on Tuesday October 29, 2019 @02:00PM (#59359142) Homepage Journal

        Not to mention dealing with Adobe. Adobe has the most attention whoring software I've ever seen. "Look at me! Flash needs an update! Hey, I'm down here, look update me!" Which includes "Hey, I know it's the same PDF you made three years ago and the format doesn't change all that rapidly, but I really think you need to update your PDF reader...."

        Not to mention they immediately deprecated old versions. I ran a K1000 system for my last company, there were seriously times I checked in the morning to see if there was a new version of Flash, there wasn't by lunch time my users were bitching they were getting messages their version of Flash was out of date and wouldn't work on a site. Sure enough, a new version came out between 9:00 and lunch and they already had expired the previous one.

        I'm glad to see Flash go just so I don't have to deal with Adobe.

        • You do need to update your PDF reader, because PDF does too much. If it only did things necessary for displaying content and maybe at most validating form input, it wouldn't be such a security nightmare.

          • For about 99.9% of PDF's, you can use something like SumatraPDF because those files don't use any of those features, and basically stick to what PDF was originally created for. It's really a very small minority where you actually need to use Adobe Reader.

        • To be fair, you actually do need to update Flash and Reader. The reason is because like with Java, they were some of the most commonly and severely exploited pieces of software back when they were in common use. Thankfully Java isn't used much on the web anymore, Flash is finally starting to die, and Reader is starting to become less relevant due to built-in PDF viewing in browsers (and Windows defaults to opening PDFs in Edge, so the most common OS too).

          The other comment here also nails it, Reader allow

      • Flash was used often in advertisements. Pretty much any animation / video banner ad was flash. While it would certainly crash browsers, it was WONDERFULLY easy to block. Just disable flash for all sites except your favorites, and these stupid distracting, bandwidth-sucking ads would not even be downloaded or processed. That was so much better than current HTML5 video ads which, thanks to browsers and their (lack of) blocking features, are pretty difficult to block. You have to rely on extensions which rarel

        • Extensions work really well, and don't require manual updating.

          I simply do not see ads. Perhaps you're using shit extensions, instead of uBlock Origin?

        • It wasn't until years in that you could block Flash in that manner. For many many years there was no means of doing so.
    • Er what? Not many hated Flash because Flash was a platform for video and animations. They hated Flash specifically because of performance, security, stability, and battery issues in the case of mobile. I didn’t have a great computer when Flash was at its peak, and it would make it slow and lethargic. I was lucky that when it crashed that it would only crash my browser; sometimes it would take the OS with it. At the time I didn’t have the money to build a high end gaming machine just to play Flas
  • Thatâ(TM)s about it.

  • What if I want to archive stuff? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Dirk Becher ( 1061828 ) on Tuesday October 29, 2019 @02:21PM (#59359228)

    Some flash movies might still be interesting from a historical perspective.

  • So if Google is going to stop indexing Flash content, then making a site in Flash gets your content out of the Surveillance Capitalism ecosystem? Funny I guess that's one reason to start working with Flash again.
    • No, it just makes your website undiscoverable using Google. A robots.txt file with a "robots disallow" directive on every page (which Google still honours) along with a "meta name=”robots” content=”noindex” tag" on every page accomplishes the same goal. Although if you want to be undiscoverable one can't help but wonder why your website isn't password protected.
  • This will mark then end of an era on the web. Flash used to be a huge part of the internet right up until the late 2000s.

  • I used google as it provided a good search engine. Now it ignores what I search for to provide irrelevant things someone else that searched for something else (that is similar to one of my terms if misspelled) also have been interested in. But hey, it choose to not index things google doesn't like for some reason and makes it hard to read sites that doesn't use https which is obviously good /s. Guess those sites not using google tracking cookies and scripts makes them suspect...

    • Google still provides better results from other search engines. Bing has too much porn, and Yahoo uses Bing.

      I'd use Yandex more if I knew how to read Russian competently and was looking for something specifically in Russian.

      But Google's search has become really boring lately. I like to use it once in a while to find something new or interesting. It was really easy back a few years ago (2014) but now the search results are all normalized and stale. Nothing pops up fresh grabbing attention.

      As for old school

  • I actually paid Codeweavers for the priviledge of playing Flash videos back in the day. Today if it doesn't work natively on Linux it isn't worth playing.

  • WTF (Score:3)

    by Waccoon ( 1186667 ) on Tuesday October 29, 2019 @08:12PM (#59360450)

    ...a consortium of internet companies (including Adobe itself) committed to killing Flash by 2020.

    Obsolete technology doesn't have to be killed. I know it's popular for geeks to celebrate the slow death of Flash, but I find it incredibly hypocritical how they champion freedom of choice and then have to go out of their way to force people not to use something that was popular for decades for good reasons.

    I, for one, do not approve of killing off any technology. If it's useful, people should still be able to use it. If it's not useful, it will die on its own. Anything else is just political bullshit.

  • ... mainly because it could be used to bypass apple's walled garden fences.

  • I remember when my boss told me to move our website and get everything copied. And make the necessary changes, updates, and fix the years-old typos... And I found out the site was all SWFs. Asked the dev for the password. Informed it was his copyrighted content, and was quoted a price. Long weekend remaking everything and then recovering the DNS records and moving everything on a Tuesday night. Two months of calls and emails from Network Solutions as our *former* web dev tried to steal back the domain. Flas

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