by Craig Hordlow, Chief Search Strategist

I believe that, by definition, accurate predictions about the future sound outlandish.

Think of the world as we know it in 2007 and try to imagine accurately predicting this reality in 1979.

Bill Gates and Steve Jobs were interviewed on May 30 at the D5 conference. Clearly, these are two men who have dramatically shaped the world we live in. The interview explored their past and current contributions, and their future aspirations.

There were many aspects of the interview that were fascinating, but from a search perspective, there was a theme that signified a large change in search on the near horizon – one that may seem outlandish.

I believe this change will be the eventual elimination of the browser.

Two of history’s greatest technical visionaries were enthusiastic about rich internet applications. At one point, with a wave of a hand to the ether, Gates described content that existed in “the cloud” – referring to the web as he described the processing limitations of the browser.

Both men described how their companies are making richer applications by developing for devices (iPhone). Jobs also explained the limitations of a web browser, and how the future of the internet lies in a large departure from a browser based experience.

So what does this mean for search?

Well, currently search engines robots cannot read rich internet applications (RIA), which are becoming an increasing part of the web. This means Ajax, JavaScript, Flash and video. As developers move away from the browser, they move away from discoverability.

Despite how sophisticated search engine robots appear, they are actually quite primitive. They only understand very simple text based content, and at the rate developers are employing richer media forms, this is going to become a large problem.

SEOs are aware of this problem and have created solutions – the most common one being creating a robot-friendly version of parts, if not all, of their site for search.

However, this is not a long term solution. At some point, search engines will have to improve their ability to read RIA’s.

Until that day arrives, it is imperative that designers and developers make sure that a robot friendly version of their content exists, and that these pages have been reviewed by a professional SEO. Simply having the pages is not necessarily going to assure desirable ranking.