Google is more than a name, its a verb in the dictionary. It is to internet search the way Xerox was used to refer to photocopying. The term is now part of our everyday vernacular. As ingrained as "googling" is for finding information on the internet, its interesting to think about what children consider when they want to find something on the web. Suprisingly, its not Google, nor Yahoo! or MSN for that matter...actually, its a part of Google, but what they are increasingly using is YouTube. Yep, video search. Show me a video and a thousand words or more can be "seen" in a single search find. The NYTimes covers this interesting phenonmenon in this story.Wibe7.tv. This is a search engine specifically for YouTube and is explained more thoroughly in this ReadWriteWeb post. Expect to see more of visual search (oh bad pun!) in the near future and soon you too may be seeing just what you were looking for. So I ask you to stop and ponder for a moment the search landscape we now currently use. Try to imagine the future 5 or 10 years from now as broadband is more prevalent and even basic computers are more powerful than high end desktops we now have. And then you may see just how visual search matures and becomes the predominant way we find information on the web. Granted, visual search can't be used for everything, but increasingly, there is enough content, covering enough subjects captured through video that this is now a legitimate search tool. Expect to see it showing up more and more when our current crop of grade school kids hit the universities in a few year's time and they turn in research papers on E-Ink paper with embedded video. Enter
