Question: Does anybody know of good examples of functionality that satifies similar
user needs as a search, but has no actual “text-box” search?
Answer: You could think of this as a balance between the number of categories you have and the amount of text you have. If you don’t have much text each chunk could be it’s own category and you could link right to it. At some point you have so many categories there’s diminishing returns and it’s easier to stop trying to categorize everything and just let the computers do the searching, even though they aren’t very good at it.
In short, clicking on a link and using a text search are really the same thing, the difference is that in the former the human does the work of scanning and selecting from all the available options and in the latter the computer does more of the heavy lifting. The right approach depends on how much you can categorize and how well you can present those categories (or how well you can build a search engine, but these are generally pretty dumb and only a good last resort when you’re dealing with tons of text).
I realize that’s probably not the answer you’re looking for, but I still like it :)