tedster - 8:53 pm on Mar 28, 2008 (gmt 0)

What Matt Cutts has confirmed is that any one of Google's IP addresses may be routed to any of Google's physical data centers. And clearly, the data available through any given IP often does not match that available through another IP - even comparing IP addresses that are serving live results at the moment.

Google is well over half a million servers at this point - and possibly approaching 1 million or even higher. You're absolutely right. Iif you haven't already done so, it's time to chuck the old mental data center model into the trash.