Flash Support For Google Instant Previews

Google announced they are now adding Flash support to their instant previews.

Google Instant Previews launched in November, giving Google searchers a way to preview the landing page of the search results prior to visiting the page. When it first launched it did not support Flash web sites and the previews were not fully visible on those results. But now, Google is rolling out Instant Previews for Flash based web sites.

Google offers tips on ensuring your Flash sites display well within the Instant Previews:

• Make sure that your site has a reasonable, seamless experience for visitors without Flash. This may involve creating HTML-only equivalents for your Flash-based content that will automatically be shown to visitors who can’t view Flash. Providing a good experience for this case will improve your preview and make your visitors happier.
• If Flash components are rendering but appear as loading screens instead of actual content, try reducing the loading time for the component. This makes it more likely we’ll render it properly.
• If you have Flash videos on your site, consider submitting a Video Sitemap which helps us to generate thumbnails for your videos in Instant Previews.
• If most of the page is rendering properly but you still see puzzle pieces appearing for some smaller components, these may be fixed in future crawls of your page.

Here is a sample of how a Flash site is shown with Instant Previews:

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