By far the best option is to see it in action yourself. You can do this simply by visiting the main Google.com home page (on google.co.uk you have to sign in to your Google account to switch Instant on) and then starting to type in the search box (assuming that you’re using one of the currently supported browsers: Chrome 5/6, Firefox 3, Safari 5 for Mac and Internet Explorer 8).

In practice there are plenty of teething problems – as you’ll see from the screenshot, the first prediction if you type “Google Instant” is “Google Instant Not Working” – but if you persevere you should be able to get it up and running.

Once you have seen it in action, I think that most people will agree that Google Instant really is as extraordinary as Google claims.

One of the big questions Google Instant raises is where does this leave the competition? And Bing in particular. I can’t see how Bing can compete on the desktop unless it has the resources and capability to do exactly the same – which, let’s face it, must be a pretty tall order.

I think the problems will turn out to be even more acute in the handheld space (where Google says “we plan to release it soon”). Google Instant’s real-time and predictive approach will come into its own on the smartphone where typing a few letters and tabbing a couple of times will let you intelligently move through Google’s entire index until you find the link you’re after.

If Microsoft had managed to pull off something like Instant itself, it might well have proved the game changer the company has been desperately looking for. As it is, the hardwired Bing button on the new Windows Phone 7 devices may well turn into an embarrassment and a massive tactical mistake.

On Bing, Microsoft’s very handy and super-relevant search engine, it would seem that Anglian Windows has bought a featured spot that pops up to tell you about the new Government scrappage scheme – not the one that applies to cars, the one that applies to double glazing.

Except that “Windows” has to be one of the most frequently searched terms on the web  -  I put it in almost every search because I’m always looking for Network error messages and their fixes, and if I leave “Windows” out then I get five times as many hits about Linux, which I don’t need to see. I am very unlikely to go from my “Windows” search to Anglian for some new double-glazing, so quite why Anglian’s ad appears when I type terms such as “windows trust failure vmware” into Bing is a mystery.

Thank God they only pay when people click on the ad, or the Government may be bailing out another company.

You could argue Microsoft’s position is born out of desperation. On whatever metric you chose to use, MSN Search (or Windows Live, I lost track of its names in the end) fell behind Google. Number of users, amount of money it made, brand awareness, effectiveness of the raw search – Google kept on winning.

And the fact remains that, if you place a couple of search terms in Bing and in Google, the top 10 search results Google throws up are, more likely than not, going to be more relevant. This is a very difficult thing to test (any pedants needn’t worry about telling me of my misuse of the word “fact” in this paragraph), but I think most people would agree with that assessment.

What’s clever about the Bing approach is that it reduces the importance of those first ten results. For anyone unfamiliar with Bing, I should say that it not only returns a top ten list but also provides a handy shortlist of terms down the left-hand side.

So, earlier I did a search for Windows 7 (the screenshot that sits atop this page). Scrolling down that list produces a number of Microsoft sites, the Wikipedia entry, a review site, a YouTube video and a couple of very techie sites. But the likelihood is that someone typing in “Windows 7″ wasn’t looking for that.

In fact, they were probably looking for the topmost of the suggested searches of “Download Windows 7″; press that link and it performes the search. And, right at the top sits a link to Microsoft’s download site for Windows 7.

That on its own is quite a nice improvement, but when you enter a hardware product it becomes even more impressive. Enter the term “Apple iPhone” into bing.com – not www.bing.co.uk, which is still some way behind its American cousin – and you’ll find a series of prepared searches specifically for that product – Manual, Repair (is that Microsoft having a dig, I wonder?), Games, Accessories, etc. It’s neat and, in terms of getting most people where they want to go quickly, I think it’s more successful most of the time.

I’ve argued this point in a past PC Pro podcast, and was met with thinly disguised disgust, but I suspect the vast majority of the UK population – and possibly even a number of PC Pro readers – would prefer this method of searching rather than having to think of the precise three search terms to find the site or article they’re looking for.

So, to answer the original question my headline poses, could this be enough to kill Google? It’s incredibly unlikely. If I was in charge at Google HQ, I’d respond quickly by setting up a very similar feature myself – however much it might gall me to copy Microsoft at anything to do with search. And if pride stops them from fighting back in this way, I believe they will lose market share, and fast.

Am I foolishly misguided? I’ll erect my barriers against the oncoming verbal assault… either way, I’d be interested to know what people think.