Number of Pages Varies by the Minute on a [site:] Search

[ryanfromaustin]

If I run a "site:mysite.com" on my website, I get widely-varying results throughout the day. Within a matter of a few hours, I can get 10 different results, and the results differ by sometimes hundreds or thousands of pages (or as little as 2 or 3). At first, I just assumed that this was a variation in the different data centers, but this behavior has persisted for several weeks. It seems that the data centers would be synced up by now. What is even more strange is that sometimes I get different results if I execute the same query in IE and then in Firefox.

Has anyone else experienced this sort of strange behavior? Any thoughts? This is corresponding to an SEO initiative by our company, so I am wondering if this could be some weird sandbox effect...

[g1smd]

Google has some 700 active IP address serving results across some 44 Class-C blocks [webmasterworld.com]. Every time you search you are seeing a different datacentre.

Google has at least two versions of their index in play right now, as well as some "experiment [webmasterworld.com]" running on several others.