MediaWombat Indexing Flash

Steve Webb and Troy Yohn are just two guys with day jobs working on the problem of indexing flash content in their own spare time.

MediaWombat is a search engine that parses through SWF files and catalogues information based on it. “We crawl the internet looking for SWF files, then grab them, rip them apart, index them and then allow for the contents of them to be searched,” their wiki says.

They have a nice preview feature where users can choose which of the Flash content they want to view. For each result, users can preview the whole Flash page, embedded audio, images and videos. Their live crawler stats page (which understandably takes a lot of time to load) shows that they have only ripped 100,000 flash URLs so far, most of which are flash games.

The search engine is not without its drawbacks like needing a lot of time to return search results in the first place. For the time being, there are also repetitions of results and very few or no results for most keywords. But I’m rooting for them, because their enthusiasm rubs off and frankly there isn’t much choice yet.

Another fascinating thing about MediaWombat is that they are also working on an “Adsense/Adwords” ad distribution system with an ability to bring context-sensitive ads to flash-heavy websites.

If you think their name/logo doesn’t seem as cool as the work they do, they already agree with it and would like to hear from you if you have any better ideas. If you’re an investor and interested in helping this project, mail to investors@mediawombat.com