[ladon86]

One of the main issues for advertisers (as far as I can tell) is that this increases competition for the keywords which Google predicts first, and decreases traffic for the other keywords.

This already happened with Google Suggest, but I think that Instant search will result in even more users only interacting with the first suggestion.

For example, the term "social networking" will now get far more traffic than "social network", because it appears first. If I wanted to search for "social network", I can't just type it, I have to type it, press down, then press enter. Otherwise, I'm still searching for "social networking".

It creates more of a winner-takes-all market in search terms.

[ugh]

No you don’t. Type “social network” (no quotation marks) and press enter, Google will then search only for what you typed, without the suggestion. It’s not exactly obvious that you can do that but it makes sense. You can use Instant just as you used Google before and still get the same behavior, they seem to have taken great care of making this behave exactly like before (i.e. typing something and pressing enter will only search for exactly what you typed, pressing enter adds an entry to your browser’s history just as before, etc.).

[msg]

You can also press the Delete key to cut short a search. I would prefer to hit space multiple times and get the same behavior.

I tried searching for wtf. It lengthens the term to wtfismygearscore, which appears to be some WoW tool. What I don't like about the tool is that it makes my searches too specific! It doesn't know when to quit and the completion is often longer than I want it to be.

Strange.