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dpf
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google - different results - 3/20/2006 16:54:26
i was on the phone with a client.. we both went to google.com, typed in the same word and clicked web search. his company appeared #3 on the left in my results and not at all in his. as we read down the page there were differences as well. any thoughts or experience here?
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Mojo
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RE: google - different results - 3/20/2006 17:01:55
It's been that way for years. Different browsers on different operating systems often pull different results.
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dpf
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RE: google - different results - 3/20/2006 18:08:54
thanks - i didnt know that. my sister in newyork tested it and got a different result. those crazy kids at google.........
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dpf
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RE: google - different results - 3/20/2006 18:20:35
quote:
Different browsers actually both used IE
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yb2
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RE: google - different results - 3/20/2006 18:31:00
why don't we all agree on a time and a set of words and do a test? I'm sure between us we can cover all browsers and OSs
Must remember to delete those pesky cookies first too!
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Mojo
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RE: google - different results - 3/20/2006 18:35:13
The upshot of the deal is different results are retured to different people. Location, time, language, browser, browser settings, operating system, complexity of the search query - they could all play a part.
If you do SEO work you must be aware of this as a client will often show different results that what you get. For this purpose, I always specify the browser and operating system that the tests will be done on. Even then, the results sometimes vary, but not by much. When I am paid purely on keyword placement I just hope it evens out (there have been times where I lost and a few times where I gained).
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jeepless
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RE: google - different results - 3/20/2006 19:32:33
In addition to the reasons Mojo gave, which Google server you are accessing also plays a major role:
quote:
Google is comprised of literally tens of thousands of servers. Each server is part of a larger cluster of computers. Each cluster forms part of a data center. Each data center then acts as an independent branch of Google. These data centers are found all over the US. For the longest time Google only had about 13 data centers that served all the results to the world. Now the number is estimated at around 80. These data centers are dispersed throughout the US in geographically specific areas. They have done this so that queries are served to the data center nearest to the user.
For example, while there are a large number of data centers on the eastern coast, a person searching from San Francisco will likely be served their search results from a data center near them, such as an Oregon or California data center. It is because of the differences in these data centers that someone searching in New York will see different results than someone in Los Angeles.
It is reasonable to think that each data center acts somewhat independently of the others. That means that their update schedules are different as are their crawling schedules. This accounts for why there are differences in search results. Because of Google's perpetually updating index, the results you see near you may be similar to results in other data centers but ultimately different.
This could be due to how the crawlers retrieve sites - a crawler may find a site closer to it more easily and therefore add it to the index sooner than a geographically far away crawler would find the same site. For example, a site in Vancouver, Canada may appear in the California data center days before the eastern data centers. Because this site would be added to the west data center sooner, it will have an impact on the search results returned sooner. One site can have a subtle but noticeable effect on the index. Yet the effects aren't noticed across all data centers at the same time.
Full text of this article can be found here: Why do I see different Google results than my clients?
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dpf
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RE: google - different results - 3/21/2006 8:29:29
quote:
If you do SEO work ..lol..which I dont! I have studied SEO enough to know that its really a long voyage to be an expert. my client is in the same town so I wonder if different servers is an issue. Im going to try it again today. he wonders if having his site as his home page impacts it - well im going to try that. anyway, the strange part is that he is #3 when i look in ohio, #2 when my sister in New York looks and not found as far back as page 6 when he looks.
Thanks everyone
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