All searches are not the same

Why are my search engine results different than yours?

If you manually check how well your Web site ranks on Google, you might have noticed different results on searches between your computer and someone else’s. (Manually checking your rankings is when you directly type your company name or keywords in the search box, and then look at the results.)

Here are some reasons why the results can differ:

Multiple Data Centers

When you perform a search on Google, your query is sent to one of Google’s many data centers. Individual results between data centers may vary while the Google index is being updated across all of them. The choice of which server will give you your search results depends on a variety of factors, including where you are located.

You might see this affect you in the following way:
Let’s say you search for the words “recycled building materials” from your home computer. You see the results and think the #2 result will be useful, but you forget to bookmark it or write it down. When you’re at work you want to call the #2 result to get the address of the shop, so you perform the same search. However, when you look at result #2, it’s not the same! This can happen if your searches were sent to different data centers and the results at the data centers were out of sync.

Different Countries

Google has different indexes for different countries, such as Google UK (www.google.co.uk), Google Canada (www.google.ca), Google Mexico (www.google.com.mx) and many, many others.

If you’re on one of the country domains, you have the option to search for results only in one of those countries. For example, if you use www.google.ca, you can have an option to search only for “pages from Canada”.

Personalized Search

Google has a new service called “Personalized Search”. If you’re signed up for it, the service will adjust your search results based on what you’ve previousy searched for, and the links you’ve clicked on.

If you and your friend both have Personalized Search, you’ll likely see different search results, because you each have different types of searches you perform and varying preferences in the Web sites you click to.

If you are using this service and don’t want your results to be personalized, you can click the “Turn OFF Personalized Search for these results” link on the page of results you see after a search.