The New York Times has a long article about new technologies coming to computers and the web allowing people to interact with their computers without the need of keyboards, focusing around touch screens and browsing the web without browsers:

This software plug-in for Web browsers tries to make it possible to navigate, find and share information by directly browsing the images, video and other digital media that are increasingly common on the Web.

PicLens currently offers a small icon cue inset in each Web photo that lets users know they are at a site like Facebook, Google or Flickr that can be browsed with the software. Clicking on the icon transports the user away from the conventional page-oriented Web into an immersive browsing environment.

The software does away with the browser frame and gives the user the effect of flying through a three-dimensional space that feels like an unending hallway of images. In the future, the Cooliris designers plan to make it possible to browse text and video as well.

What particularly surprises me about people within my industry (SEO) is how many search strategists or online marketers in general seem to place such a faith in Google’s search engine algorithm in being able to figure out every little thing about human nature essentially.

I consistently read how the Google can determine links and relevance algorithmically, only to spout the latest Google Bombing in the next sentence. Let’s think about this: Google Bombing should never work if the relevance is so far on the opposite ends. So why does it? Google still relies heavily on text and links to help piece together the puzzle of what people want.

Don’t get me wrong here, Google’s ability in this regard has definitely worked, but only to a degree. Relevance is very relative: a site selling pants linking to another site that talks about China may seem to be on separate issues, but could possibly be under the same organization, may be an affiliate, or could be actually be unrelated. Humans can easily take a look at a site and see the design of the two sites looking the exact same and immediate know that they are related, but an engine based solely around text may never know the similarity.

The fact is, search engines still cannot read images, (even closed captioning at this point in time otherwise Captchas would be essentially pointless), flash, and videos without the help of text on the page describing what the subject is about. Google is being left behind as more and more technologies are developing around widgets, flash, and video as many developers either do not know how limited Google really is on needing text to find their products or do not have the desire to provide thousands of pages of text to describe each and every action.

In my opinion, the fact that Google’s homepage and search results are still heavily text and relatively unchanged since its founding over the past decade only goes to show how far behind Google is in terms of being able to find these products. And unless Google can start read image text, it will continue to fall back as new technological developers will not put “search engine readable” on the top of their list–the only concern will be developing a new product that will continue to revolutionize the web in ways that will make our lives that much easier and more interactive.

The question then becomes, in a world that begins to operate around these amazing widgets, flash, and other interactive content (duplicate content!) what mode of thought takes over in place of searching?