Google engineer Ran Adler (sometimes he spells his first name Ron to avoid confusing English speakers) deserves most of the credit here. He went to Adobe with a proposal for the hooks into the Flash player that he needed and worked with their engineers to get those hooks working. I don't doubt there was a fair amount of work on Adobe's side, too, but it wasn't like Adobe had the technology in place before Ran started working with them.
Ran came up with an API for the hooks he needed that didn't give away too much of the most clever parts of what he was doing. The belief was that Google would get the hooks it wanted and in return, Adobe could share the special Flash player with other major search engines and everyone would be indexing Flash content. The hope was that Google would just be doing it a bit more cleverly than the competition. I'm not sure if any of the other major search engines ever used the hooks Ran designed.
Source: I worked on Google's rich content indexing team from 2006 to 2010. Ran worked mostly on Flash indexing and I worked mostly on JavaScript indexing.
Ran came up with an API for the hooks he needed that didn't give away too much of the most clever parts of what he was doing. The belief was that Google would get the hooks it wanted and in return, Adobe could share the special Flash player with other major search engines and everyone would be indexing Flash content. The hope was that Google would just be doing it a bit more cleverly than the competition. I'm not sure if any of the other major search engines ever used the hooks Ran designed.
Source: I worked on Google's rich content indexing team from 2006 to 2010. Ran worked mostly on Flash indexing and I worked mostly on JavaScript indexing.