Google Data Centers

Google "rotates" Data Center SERP..?

[wmburke]

Hi all;

I'm getting conflicting info in some of the forums here, and others...

The SERP I get when I search Google.. Are the results of different data centers displayed at different times?

In other words, say I search the same term at different times/days... Is it true that say, on Monday the SERP are presented from "www-sj.google.com 216.239.35.100 ", and then search the same term at another time the results are now from www-va.google.com 216.239.37.100?i can't seem to get a difiniteve answer.. any Google expert opinions?

[takagi]

If you go to an MS-DOS screen and type

ping www.google.com

you can how it resolves in an IP address (216.239.?

[/code]?.?[code]

?). The IP address can change every 5 minutes or so. So for that time interval (the so called Time To Live or TTL), all the searches on your PC are send to that one datacenter. After that time, a new (sometimes the same) address is decided for a similar interval. You can also see the IP address used for your last search if you move the mouse to the word 'Cached' and look at the bottom of the browser window. You can see something like

http

://216.239.57.104/search?q=cache:...

This last trick seems to work only for 'www.google.com' and not for other TLD's (e.g 'www.google.co.uk' or 'www.google.de').