Question

Topic: SEO/SEM

Different Search Results Ranking For Same Keyword

Posted by Anonymous on 1/13/2010 at 2:17 PM ET 125 Points
Two of our top executives are sitting at their respective desks typing the exact same keyword phrase into Google and the organic results are coming in different order...

I've asked Google why this happens and they don't provide a satifactory answer -- they basically ask more questions! Can anyone out there explain the radically varying search results for a given set of keywords? Does Google use different algorithms at the same time? Could they be testing side-by-side? Could one algorithm take a past search or web site visit activity into consideration in generating results? thx
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  • Posted on 1/13/2010 at 2:22 PM Accepted
    Of course Google didn't tell you. Love that.

    There are several reasons for what has happened:

    1. Datacenters
    Google runs on many servers -- each hosted in a datacenter. Not every datacenter has the same information on its servers. Some datacenters are faster to update than others. Which datacenter you receive results from is not dependent on your geographic location, therefore, it is possible that two people in the same office get two different datacenters, each with different rankings.

    2. Personalized Search
    If either (or both) of these folks is signed into their Gmail account (or any Google account), Google is showing personalized results for that person. In other words, Google is tracking your clicks and behavior and will server more personalized results based on your surfing/clicking history.

    The testing you were asking about often does happen as well on various datacenters. So, for example, they could test on one datacenter, so you may have very different results on a separate datacenter.
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