4 reasons for different search results
lmost everyone has faced this problem at least once - you look up your target keywords on the Internet and get different website rankings than the ones stated in the rankings report. How can this be explained?
The same search term may provide different search result because of the user's:
1. Web History
We know that nowadays search engines form the search results basing on the search queries you make, websites you visit and search results you go to. Let's take an example - you are signed in with your Gmail account. This will record your web history. And after you sign out of your Google account, Google will send tracking cookies to your browser and it will keep your browsing history.
By default, your results get biased. If you'd like to see search results that are not biased, you need to sign out of all your accounts, clear browser cookies and make the search again.
2. Location
As search engines know your IP address, they can determine your location. So, they also modify the search results according to your specific location. For example, if you look up "book shop" and you are searching from Chicago, you will probably get the list of shops close to you. Search engines also take your browser language into account while personalizing the search results.
3. Universal Search
Nowadays search engines combine their "regular" search results with Video, Images, News and others. This is called Universal Search and stands for a system of blended search results (introduced by Google in 2007).
So, when talking about the rank of some particular item, it's also important to consider what part of Universal Search results we are talking about.
For example, you get a report saying that your site is ranked 3 in Google with example site keyword. When you enter example site in Google, you see that its actual rank is 5. But if you do not take Google Places results, your site is actually ranked 3. So, it depends on how you look at it.
4. Google Dance
In June, 2010, Google switched to the new indexing system called Caffeine. Its index was updated once a month; and it took several days for update to complete. During such days, users might have been provided with different search results for the same keyword. The reason for that was that Google's 12 data centers were getting updated one by one, in turn. As Google generally picks a random data center to provide search results, the search result could have come from the new as well as the old indexes. This phenomenon is referred to as "Google Dance".
However, today things have changed. But, because Google still chooses a random data center, users may see different search results depending on the data center they come from. Now you know that differences in 1-2 rank positions has logical explanation.
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