Fancy Sites Vs Plain HTML

There has been an explosion of fancy flash sites all over the internet. Depending on the creativity of the designers these site can look quite good and be very impressive. However, despite the impressive effect, the web search functionality of some of these sites may be lost if too much flash or animation is used.
The web is constantly being “crawled” by the so called web “spiders”, programs that jump from one website to the next through links as if on a real spider web. The programs send back information the Google, MSN, and Yahoo mainframes which then compute the relevance of a given website and make it appear accordingly in “organic searches. An organic search is a search that brings up results that are deemed relevant by the search engine. The opposite of these are sponsored links that appear on the side and top of the search result pages. It’s a bit of information, but its quite relevant if you want to get into the internet marketing business.
Understanding how these search engines index and rank pages is not giving to the ordinary human being, at least that’s what the mega search companies want. They constantly change and upgrade their algorithms for better search capability.
So back to simple sites vs. Flash sites. I prefer simple html sites. They load faster and they are search engine friendlier. Obviously with the right combination or $$ and skill flash sites can be search engine friendly as well. I just prefer simplicity over grandeur.