tedster - 5:10 am on Oct 18, 2007 (gmt 0)

OK - now I see 605 results for "news" and 742 including the omitted results. That's on 64.233.169.103. You can see the IP address of your current web page by using Firefox and installing the ShowIP extension.

Querying an IP directly often gives different results than by letting google.com be direct through their load balancing and so forth. In this case, I get 608 initial results (3 more) and the same 742 when I include the omitted results.

No I don't think this is directly related to the 950 re-ranking being "turned up". Instead, my guess is that a shorter preliminary list makes such re-ranking computationally easier. People with the -950 still see their previous first page results at the end, but that end just comes quicker.