Silverlight and Google searches
on 15/10/2008 - like it?
Well unless you’ve been living under a rock you’d know that Silverlight 2.0 has now been released. Why do you care? … Assuming the rock you were under wasn’t too big :) you’d know that the first release of Silverlight was really intended for designers and not developers although, there was technically nothing stopping you from creating anything you wanted. It was just extremely painful. Think pencil in ear.
Silverlight 2.0 brings all the goodies that we’ve come to expect as good little Microsoft developers. We have better looking user controls, layout controls and a host of 3rd party controls from companies like Telerik and ComponentArt.
And so the great move to Silverlight begins, anyone that has any half decent web application is going to want it redone in Silverlight and most new projects will want to take advantage of the hype around this technology. Please note (pretty please?) I don’t really like the word “hype” since the technology truly is amazing .. anyway with the CYA out the way I too started on a new design for some of my own products.
One of these is my Mafooku shared store system. This site, like many, requires that Google can do a good job searching for content since there are thousands of products for sale. Then it hit me. How is Google going to search my content when it’s embedded in a control … I’m sure many of you are already shouting - but just emit the same content and hide it … nah, not really practical on many sites and a waste of bandwidth.
You probably hoping there is some great solution - nah … nothing yet. I’m thinking there needs to be some interface added for search engines to find the exact content you’re displaying but I am unaware of anything as yet. I’m not saying there isn’t :) I just haven’t found it yet.
I did want to share a link to a short blog post about a transform you can add, that a search engine can use to get a form of rendered and readable content which can be searched.
It did also just occur to me that creating external links like
http://somelink/?id=x
need a way to be interpreted by the Silverlight application so that the correct content can be displayed … fun :) I’m sure it will be easy but definitely a new way of doing things.
It is the best of Flash, Smart clients and the web all in one. I hope you’re going to get learning too! Nobody needs another html web site :)
ps: Dear Google, please make me a Silverlight Adsense control :)
Tags: google, siliverlight
