Different SERPs from a computer 20 feet away?

[adcoutkast]

tried to search for this topic as i'm sure ive seen it discussed before but couldn't locate. sorry if this is redundant.

one of our top kw's ranks #5 from my office but #11 from my co-workers, 20 feet away? neither of us are logged into gmail accounts or anything like that. in fact, she doesn't even use google that often she says. she is a Y user, go figure. anyways. what would cause this difference in the serps?

adc

[Hissingsid]

Cookies!

[kamikaze Optimizer]

Yeah, cookies and browsers. FF and IE rarely match up the same serps for me.

[oddsod]

DCs?

Also, number of results in preferences. 10 results per page will show a different top 10 to the 100 results per page choice.

[potentialgeek]

Different computers, different browsers, different times, different data centers, different locations.

What next? Different political voting habits?

&*%-!

[adcoutkast]

pg i agree...this is getting ridiculous. looks to me like the seo game has run its course. if you cant guarantee your rank based on what you do onsite, if so many offsite factors now determine your fate, whats the point?

[Hissingsid]

Looking at it from the other side of the wall as a user wouldn't it be nice if you could say "when I'm searching for stuff to buy show me pages like this one and when I'm looking for information stuff show me pages like this".

FWIW I think that the big problem with Google is that it has aspirations to do this using artificial intelligence, assuming the it can learn without any concious input from the user. But it gets it wrong too often, mostly I think, because not everyone lives in California.

Cheers

Sid

[oddsod]

>>because not everyone lives in California
I have the opposite problem today as I'm based in the UK. :( I'm was just trying to find a good related charity in the US to send to somebody who has a specific problem, but all the results I get are of UK sites, even if go to Google.com!

(can anyone remind me how to force results from a particular country?)

[edited by: tedster at 6:43 pm (utc) on April 25, 2008]

[Bewenched]

What's really strange is here in the US i was searching for some basic programming stuff and google kept giving me sites in either chinese or japanese.

[Jane_Doe]

I was on the phone talking to my husband about a set of serps in Google the other day, and even though we both entered our queries at about the same time in the same metro area, he saw different results. One site that was missing from his results was one I had clicked on a few weeks ago. It made me wonder if we each just got some random results or if perhaps I was getting something of a personalized serp, as they knew I was interested in that site having clicked on it before?

[tedster]

can anyone remind me how to force results from a particular country?

There's no way I know of to force results to be from the US only. If you go to a Google country specific tld, such as google.co.uk, there is a radio button under the search box to restrict results to just sites in that country. But there's no such mechanism for US results, because there is no separate google.us. That domain just redirects to .com.

[BradleyT]

There are soooo many different serps.

A coworker and myself see very different results whether we're both logged in (personal and work google accounts give different results too), both logged out, one in one out, and then doing this all at home gives even more unique result sets.

[HuskyPup]

can anyone remind me how to force results from a particular country?

Try using an Opera browser, I can assure you that you will get different results, you could also use something like megaproxy.

[Hissingsid]

Cookies!

When you use different browsers they have different search histories stored so they give you different results. Try clearing the cache and clearing the cookies from 2 browsers, close them down and restart them and you will get the same results on each.

Cheers

Sid