Does google display the same results across the US?

[jtigrrrr]

Does google display the same results in every area of the US at any given time? Im thinking they have several indexes, and use them in a rotating fashion. Can anyone shed any light on this? Sorry if this has already been answered.

j

[tedster]

Google definitely varies the results in different areas of the US, and they have been doing this for quite a while.

[LifeinAsia]

See the threads about the data centers watch. Google has at least 40 diffeent centers, which do not have exact same copies of the information at each one. For one of our sites, we vary between 200 and 38,00 pages indexed between the DCs. We've seen other sites we monitor vary between 5-60 million pages.

So no, people in different areas do NOT always see the same results.

[glengara]

But it's not a geographical thing, is it?

[lgn1]

Geographic Proximity is a ranking factor, but its one of about a hundred.

Most SERP differences is due to people getting different datacenters.

To do a real test, make sure they enter the same Google IP address, and even this is not always fail proof. We called up several friends across the country, to test the Geographic Proximity effect. We got results that were within a few placements up or down. Definitly nothing to write home about.