Published
April 30th, 2011 by
Roslyn Garavaglia Back in the 14th century, Google search results were the same for everybody. What you saw, I saw. Now you, me, and the guy next door, even the person sitting next to you, all see different search results in Google when we search on the exact keyword phrase. It makes life a bit more difficult if I’m trying to demonstrate your website’s ranking (position on the page) or confirm your Adwords ads are showing.
Why are your Google Search Results different to mine?
Several factors influence your search results, including your geographic location, your search habits and search history and Google’s data centres (servers). If you use any Google services such as a Google home page, news reader, Gmail, Google Maps etc, will return different results depending on whether you’re “logged in” or “logged off”.
YOUR PHYSICAL LOCATION
Every computer connected to the Internet is assigned a unique number called an Internet protocol (IP) address. Google identifies your IP address and tries to deliver the most relevant results to match your location. Google does this by redirecting your search query to the appropriate local search database. So, if you’re in Australia searching on Google.com, your results will be biased towards Australian websites. Google will often modify results of searches made from the same PC in order to ‘improve’ the user experience.
GOOGLE DATA CENTRES
When we visit Google, we are assigned a content server. Google has hundreds of content delivery servers located all over the globe. Where the data server is located influences your results. Google tries to serve country specific results to a user unless that user switches to another Google search engine (e.g. from google.com.au to google.com.fr).
Any search you conduct is routed to the data centre located nearest to you, which may contain a different collection of indexed pages. Depending on when you search, how you search, and where you search from, could connect you to any one of these data centres which won’t always be up to date with each other.
Google’s content servers are not simultaneously updated with new indexed results. It takes time for Google to propagate their search results across the entire network. So querying from locations even 20 kilometres from you can generate different results.
PERSONALISED SEARCH
Personalised search enables Google to customise your search results based on your previous search activity, i.e. the searches you have done, results you have clicked, and URLs you have typed into the address bar. As people use Gmail, Google Analytics, Google AdWords, or any other services, Google learns more about you and may make specific recommendations based on this knowledge.
Personalized search incorporates:
•Web history
•Personalized results
•Recent searches
•Universal search
•Geographic location (Local Results)
•Social search
•Real time search
Personalized Search affects everything you Google. Your results will look very different from the guy down the street, which will look very different from the guy across town…
And there you have it! (:
Tags: google accounts, google personalised search, google search, personalised search
