Does Google's www2 or www3 explain future SERPs?

[David08]

I've just learned today about www2.google.com and www3.google.com and wanted to know if these were signals for rankings yet to come. I've read quite a bit of information on the topics however most of it was outdated. I checked my keyword this morning and noticed that my rankings were great, but now it appears both www2 and www3 are offline. Can anyone explain more on this?

[tedster]

Hello David08 - welcome to the forums.

It would be so nice if something like that were true - but no, it isn't. It's more about a very complex load balancing schema.

It used to be the case that you could monitor different data centers or different Google IP addresses [webmasterworld.com] and get at least an idea about future SERPs. We even used to have regular threads here about data center watching.

But things have become less, well, predictable. You often might see some test results that an engineer or group of engineers are working with - but they never see the light of day. With close monitoring, you might see chunks of data getting moved around the monster world-wide data farm Google operates and it might stimulate a few guesses about what's up. Or it might just leave you baffled.

It's good to remember that a single query travels through many hundreds of computers in the short time it takes to generate your results. When you start poking around you can eavesdrop on parts of that process - but the whole thing is so vast it's hard to see the entire forest.

[David08]

interesting, but still weird. I'm working on a specific keyword right now that shows me as #1 on www2/www3. On google I'm 7. It would have been nice to fit the pieces together.

[tedster]

There was always a gap (and sometimes a chasm) between what you see on the other hostnames and what you see on www.google.com. You may be seeing results from a future release, or without some personalization, or without some filters... I gave up trying to figure it out.