can SWF apps running in the browser be automatically controlled/spidered, like in browser automation?

Question

suppose the owner of a website that shows info "for humans only" is tired of the bots and the spiders grabbing the data and decides to show this info in a SWF app running in the browser. So now he reimplements the structure of the website as a flash app and the bad guys can no longer navigate it using their url-following, html-parsing scripts.

What can the bad guys do here? Can you make a flash app that would run in the browser and somehow establish control over another flash app running in the browser in order to navigate its user interface and grab the text that it is displaying to the user?

Answer 1

Flash (SWF) files have always been an indexing nightmare for search engines and even today they struggle when compared to good old HTML.

However, Google reported on its Webmaster Central Blog back in 2008 that it had "Improved Flash Indexing".

Q: Which Flash files can Google better index now? We've improved our ability to index textual content in SWF files of all kinds. This includes Flash "gadgets" such as buttons or menus, self-contained Flash websites, and everything in between.

Q: What content can Google better index from these Flash files? All of the text that users can see as they interact with your Flash file. If your website contains Flash, the textual content in your Flash files can be used when Google generates a snippet for your website. Also, the words that appear in your Flash files can be used to match query terms in Google searches.

Ok, many other search engines / bots are no doubt incapable of doing such things, but Google is kinda omnipresent!

If you want to hide your content from bots and spiders; make it available to subscribers only. No need to redo it in Flash.