After playing with Google instant for awhile, I’ve come to one conclusion: it’s annoying. Overall it seems the general user base sort of enjoys it. I haven’t been able to find a massive amount of complaints, there seemed to have been way more complaints about the new layout, but still a relatively small number when you think about how many people Google serves.

Anyway, why is it annoying? Stuff keeps popping up all over the place.. While I type a term, crap starts typing itself or whatever, plus the results are moving around trying to give me a seizure. Maybe other people don’t type at 70 – 80wpm like I do, but it’s damn annoying for me.

The other annoying part is the “naughty” keyword block, for instance, if I type “Google Suc-” it’ll stop displaying results, and I’ll have to press enter. Thus, I have to leave the “instant” mode and go back to “normal” anyway.I think this type of stuff would be more useful on a mobile device where you can’t type as fast, but for PC users that can type relatively fast, it’s annoying.

I’m not just bashing Google either, I don’t particularly like Google, but I did give Instant a go for awhile to see how it was and give an honest opinion, and the result was I really didn’t like it.

Bing & Yahoo

The Bing & Yahoo deal is interesting, however Bing isn’t the best alternative to Google I’ve seen. Yandex is. It might have been a good idea to consider something like that, but I’m not sure if Yandex would be down for that sort of thing.

Yandex has very clean results in comparison to even Google. Still not perfect, but very clean. Cleaner than Bing. Go check out their alpha version at Yandex.com, I think you’ll be surprised at how clean the results are.

As far as ad sales with everything going through adcenter, sure, I think both Yahoo & Bing are going to pick up more advertisers, and bing especially will have more advertisers. Will this work out well? Only time can tell really.