You know that person who jumps in before you've finished speaking to respond to what they think you're going to say? Or in Charades, when someone shouts out their guesses when you're on the first word of a title? Well, that's the impression that the new Google Instant made on me when I took it for a test drive yesterday. (Google Instant is a new approach to search that returns results as you search.)

I decided to query "pet supply stores Mequon." Upon typing in the letter "p," I started getting returns which included "Pandora," "Pick n Save," "Pizza Hut" and "Powerball." Okay, I guess most people who enter the letter "p" are interested in music, food or winning the lottery. Fair enough. But, is it necessary to start giving returns for one letter? You had me at "p!"

When I entered the "e," it did give me several Petco listings. So, were I not discerning, I probably would have stopped there and gone to the Petco website. Good for Petco, not good for their competitors -- and not good for me because there are more convenient stores to go to than Petco. I then went to Bing (Microsoft's search engine) and entered the full query. While Bing anticipated what I might be entering as I typed, no search returns were given until I finished my query and hit "search." (You know, like the good old days at Google, the day before yesterday.) The top results were local listings for a variety of pet supply stores in the area. Good for me and good for local pet supply stores. Results in Yahoo were similar.

According to Marissa Mayer, Google's top search executive, Google's motivation in creating Google Instant was to make search "fast, fun and interactive." Users are expected to save some 2 to 5 seconds per search with the new technology.

Now, I don't know about you, but I haven't found myself thinking, "Hey, that's 5 seconds of my life that I'm never getting back again!" Call me a curmudgeon, but I tend to feel that when your primary motivation is speed, quality tends to suffer.

There could be push-back -- especially from AdWords customers (Google pay-per-click advertisers who bid for placement based on keywords). What will they do now? Bid on the letters "pe" if they want to come up for pet supplies? If searchers love it, Google could be in a bind. Google serves the searcher, but AdWords is its bread and butter. It should make for an interesting tension.

One thing's for sure, there will be lots of tweaks in weeks and months to come because Google's never been averse to changing things up. So, fasten your seatbelt. We could be in for a bumpy search.