tedster - 11:09 pm on Mar 8, 2008 (gmt 0)

That's not always the case. In fact, I'd go so far as to call it a commonly held myth. What you see when you hover is the IP address for the server that will deliver the cached page if you click. But that's not necessarily the IP address that just supplied the results.

I just did a search where the links for the cached pages are on 209.85.165.104, but the page itself was supplied by a combination of four different IP addresses: 64.233.169.147, 64.233.169.104, 64.233.169.103 and 64.233.169.99. Multiple IP addresses on the same C-block is almost always the case.

Another common approach is to ping google.com just before or after you make the query. But with Google's complex load-balancing, this also is not a sure-fire approach. Every request can possibly be routed differently.

[edited by: tedster at 11:22 pm (utc) on Mar. 8, 2008]