microlinx - 3:29 pm on May 10, 2005 (gmt 0)

One more stupid question, which is hopefully not to going to be considered "off topic", but while chasing our tails THINKING we have been penalized, is it possible that Yahoo is feeding different results to different geographic locations (yes, I'm sure they do this worldwide, but also withing the USA) or to visitors based upon past search queries by setting cookies?

The reason I ask is that I run a ranking program (Submit Wolf) that ranks a certain key phrase against the majority of the search engines. This morning a search showed me ranked as #2 in Yahoo for my preferred search term (my old position.
(note: I cleared the programs rank cache and it then gave a result of #4, my position from 10 days ago, the search does a live check of all engines and takes a few minutes to complete on broadband).

A quick double check in Yahoo! shows no such correlation.

Furthermore...in the past I have noticed between the three PC's on my desktop, I could get differnt Yahoo results between each PC. Deleting cookies or rebooting all three usually resoved the differences.

All PC's are generally clear of spyware / adware, toolbars and are checked weekly with registry mechanic, xoftspy and Spybot S&D.

So, my questions to you Yahoo guru's out there, is:
Can we assume we have been penalized, when it only looks that way from or point of reference? and in fact we still are showing up in Yahoo from different user locations, networks, PC's around the country or world?

One get's the assumption that the search results should be "vanilla" worldwide...or are the web search results actually "totty-fruity" worldwide?