MediaWombat: Search Engine for Flash

I just discovered a new search engine called MediaWombat. It’s got a weird name and I would never have thought that it’s a search engine and a really cool one to boot. Now that you know that it is in fact a search engine, you might have already guessed that it’s a search engine for media files. You can search videos, audios, images and my personal favorite- Flash sites.


The search engine actually works a lot harder than other search engines available to us. Google, our favorite search engine, does not have the ability or does not want the ability to search Flash sites because of the tedious method and the amount of resources that it is needed to accomplish the task. It actually takes more hard disk space and RAM (memory) to index Flash sites. They have to be ripped apart and have their content hosted by the search engine server(s) in order to get them indexed. So the easy way out is just to get as much available text as possible from Flash websites, index them and display limited search result information and a link to the original URL.

MediaWombat crawls the internet looking for Flash files. After seeing one, it grabs the Flash file (.SWF) and rips it apart to get the content embedded in it. The content will then be indexed by the search engine to be available in the search results. This will be a great help to people looking for Flash content and for Flash site owners who wants their websites indexed properly.

The search results page is obviously rich in Flash and other media such as audio and video. The preview feature is pretty cool. You can choose which of the Flash content you want to view. You can preview the whole Flash page, embedded audio, images and videos. The text content is listed below the preview buttons and there is an email feature available for quick sharing.

The MediaWombat team created the search engine because of the large amount of un-indexed Flash content available in the internet, from YouTube videos to Flash Game sites to News sites. Flash sites are awesome to look at and navigation usually delivers an amazing browsing experience, but the problem is that they are not search engine friendly. In MediaWombat, all Flash and media files are very much welcome for indexing. They take as many parts of the Flash content as possible and index those parts.


The search engine is still on its very early stages and managed to crawl and index only a handful of flash sites (mostly game sites). The logo is also a no winner but they are actually making a more professional looking logo. They also said in their wiki page that they are not too in love with the name either. Any suggestions for the name (domain name) and logo will be a great help to them. Do you have some suggestions? We'd love to hear them.