Silicon Insider: Visual Search Engine

Oct. 16 -- The Internet may be a landscape of words today, but its destiny is to become an ocean of images.

The trick will be in the navigation.

You don't have to be a dedicated Web surfer to understand why words (and numbers) dominate the Net. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but the data density of those thousand words is a heckuva lot lower than for that picture.

Thus, you can not only download most of a book before you can receive a single, photographic quality image, but you can also start reading the text from the start, while the image is still just a few thin stripes.

A decade ago, when transmission speeds were still measured in thousands of bits per second, the Web was all words. Those of you readers who were online in those days remember how thrilling it was to even see a picture forming on the screen — and then how frustrating it was to wait while the damn thing froze up everything else for 10 minutes while it downloaded one pixel at a time.

Of course, that is no longer the case. As bandwidth increased, so did the graphic complexity of the content. These days, the Web is a panorama — some would say a wasteland — of images, from movie stills to porn to pictures of auction items and book covers to spam. As broadband has reached America's homes in the last two years, it has brought in its train simple video, from brief movie trailers to extended cartoons.

Looking ahead, you can already predict the future: full-length downloadable movies available in near real-time (killing the video and DVD industries), online television, and do-it-yourself FX, simulations and animation.

That's the predictable future, the usual extrapolation of technology from the present, paced by Moore's Law. More bandwidth equals prettier pictures and longer movies.