Different results - same city?

search results different in same area?

[markov]

Hi there, I am based in Sydney, Australia and am fairly new to SEO. I am a bit foxed by this one. Today I was looking at some results from www.google.com.au - and I searched under the phrase "finance brokers" - and saw a Clients website come up on page one of the results. Great!

The results I saw were good news and so I called a friend across the city about 10 kms away.
As I spoke to him I asked him to look up the same search phrase criteria. He did so on www.google.com.au - under the same search term, on the same operating system and told me whatr he saw. Everything was the same - EXCEPT the Clients website did not appear at all. All the other entries were the same. He read the results list back to me so that I could check that we were seeing the same page. And we were. Except the Client site was not appearing. I had cleared my cache beforehand and so had he and the results were the same in IE and Firefox?

What was going on?

Anyway - in the course of our talk I asked him to look at the Client site which he did. Then after a while of chatting about this - we did our searches again and got the same results. However he then rang me up about 30 mins later to tell me that he was then getting the same results as me and the Client had now appeared. I verified this as he had sent me a screenshot earlier of his early results - and indeed the site wasn't there. And then - magically it was?

Are we missing something here? Is Google recognising that we have visited certain websites before and skewing our results to show those site. Or I missing something fundamental. As I said - our local caches had been cleared - is there an eplanation for this. It is rather disturbing - as I now feel that I may never know that what I am seeing is the same as what others are seeing. Any light on this matter would be most appreciated.