Increasing Flash searchability

One of the main concerns when building a website (blogs, wikis, ... included) is of course to make sure all data on it is readily available. Which basically means the search engines need to be able to crawl the data in a way that makes it possible to extract content and relevant keywords.

If you're using plain HTML for instance, this is pretty easy.

It does get more complicated if you're using Flash but that may be about to change.
The following article (dated: 2006) describes what you can do (or had to do in the past) to make sure your Flash-enabled website pages get (got) the correct (or increased) search rankings:
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flash/articles/flash_searchability.html

However, there have been several reports this week that Google, Yahoo and Adobe are teaming up to make Flash (SWF) files easier to crawl in-depth - more like an HTML page crawl basically.

In eWeek's article, Bill Hunt (president of Global Strategies International) is quoted as saying:

[The most significant aspect of the announcement] "is that this is not a change the site owners have to implement but that Google, and soon Yahoo, have this baked into their crawl systems and can interact with the SWF format just as a visitor to the site would, allowing them to get deep into the content discovering links and content that have previously been hidden from search engines."

This is a win-win-win situation where both the search engines and Adobe will benefit from an enhanced user experience (thus the third 'win'). And Adobe will subsequently be edging nearer to a position where it could claim to be more than a de facto standard for rich internet applications.

So, will this make the RIA era boom? And should Adobe Flash applications become an official web standard?