Google datacenter question

[worker]

Is this unusual?

For a 4 word keyword search, my site appeared in the following positions:

Datacenters:

www-ex Position 31
www-sj Position 37
www-va Position 21
www-dc Position 37
www-ab Position 20
www-in Position 15
www-zu Position 20
www-cw Position 20
www-fi Position 17

I'm surprised by the variability across the datacenters.

Any idea what is going on?

[takagi]

That used to be unusual (until the Dominic update). But used-to-be's don't count anymore.

[worker]

Any ideas as to what may be happening that could cause this?

[takagi]

Some ongoing update maybe? Almost a month ago GoogleGuy wrote that fresh data would be added, and backlinks would be brought in, and spam filters would be applied. Sofar, I only saw some fresh data, some other members reported missing sites returned or sites getting out of the index.

[WebGuerrilla]

Each data center has an index copied across many computers. If at any time a portion of those computers were offline, a portion of the db would be missing. It's possible that the fluctuation we are seeing is due to a massive hardware upgrade that has been taking place for a few weeks.

[kevinpate]

As you're basing the Q on only one 4kw search, it's hard to speculate. Could be a difference in filters, could be when you searched there's fresh content from others who hit some datacenters but not the others, or it could be there's a monster lurking in a few of the datacenters and it gobbled up your competition so you rank higher in those dc's. yeah, ok, the last one's a bit of a stretch 8^)