phpmaven - 10:26 pm on Aug 12, 2003 (gmt 0)

Jeremy,

I am well aware of how Google uses load balancing on it's servers. But obviously that is not what's going on here. I can sit at one PC and have my partner at hers and we can both hit "refresh" over and over and get the same different set of serps each time. Now during that period of time all of the packets going to Google's servers are coming from the same IP address. The ONLY difference would be the user agent in the HTTP header.

If this was just normal load balancing going on, then I would expect that during the little test we did, we would both be seeing the same results until we were routed to a different server and then we would both be seeing the same new results.

Somehow they are routing the packets coming from each PC to a different server during our little test. How they are doing it, I don't know, but I am convinced at this point that that is what is happening. Perhaps they are using a combination of IP & User Agent to determine which server to send the traffic to. After all there are quite a few scenarios where a tremendous amount of traffic would come from the same IP, AOL for example or proxy servers and so forth.

By the way, I was just kidding about the cloaking bit, I just find it very interesting trying to figure out what's going on.

phpmaven