This will result in people making searches and not completing the entire phrase as they would have in the past. If for instance you are looking for car insurance, you will type “car” and before you have time to complete your search, you will be shown ads for “Cars for sale”, “Car parts” etc which are clearly not what you wanted in the first place. This means that if you want your ads showing in the beginning of the persons search, you will need to bid a lot more for broader keywords and the prices for these will be astronomical! Also, we know how poorly broad match keywords can perform if your advert is not 100% targeted.

This also implies that we will be more inclined to use static titles as opposed to dynamic ones for our ads, bringing the click-through rate and quality score down, raising prices from that angle too.

AdWords are Google’s bread and butter when it comes to income and Google reported a 16% drop in AdWord clicks when they launched the Instant search. What are they thinking? Have they never heard of the saying, “If it aint broke, don’t fix it”? When this instant version of Google is carried across to South African Google, this will undoubtedly affect the way people use this search tool, and it is very unclear at the moment as to whether this has been a step in the right direction or not.

Google has reported that Instant has already saved 36 000 hours of time by serving people results before completing the search. So it definitely gets people clicking, but do they actually find what it is they were actually searching for? We will have to wait and see…