Earlier this week Google announced “Google Instant”, An AJAX powered realtime search engine. While you’re still typing, Google will begin to show results without you having to hit enter. This is massive in scale, and the only thing even remotely close is when Bing and Google played around with including Tweets in a realtime stream. That’s nothing compared to the sheer vastness of the web.

Users should be thrilled, advertisers should be furious. Here’s why:

Instead of showing ads based on complete thoughts, Google Instant focuses on fragments. For example, a user might begin their search by entering the word “Tech” as seen below.

Maybe the user did want to find “TechNet” on Amazon, but what if “Tech” was just part of a fragment? Perhaps the user really wanted “Tech Support”. If the user was searching for “Tech Support” then Amazon just wasted that ad impression on a completely irrelevant query.

Meanwhile, Google gets to serve more impressions by letting the user complete their thought. More impressions = more money for Google. On longer queries I believe that Google Instant could multiply the amount of ads shown four times over.

After playing around with Google Instant all afternoon, I am thoroughly impressed with how quick it is for an end user, but certainly disappointed as an advertiser.

You can see our coverage from earlier today here.