To many a frustrated search engine competitor it may seem like Google is set to conquer the world. Indeed, in 2005 Google not only launched an astonishing range of products, including Google Earth which provides users with aerial views of anywhere on Earth, but also significantly increased its share prices. In fact, studies suggest that around 400 million users around the world conduct their basic Internet searches every month using Google. That is a truly astonishing figure and one which perhaps helps justify Google’s bold mission to “organise the world's information and make it accessible”. However if you are currently using search engine optimisation on your corporate website you may have noticed that your website’s accessibility through Google can vary.
If you have noticed some variations in your Google results and those of your clients, there is no need for alarm. A certain amount of variation is, in fact, normal and can be attributed to two main factors:
1) Google’s use of multiple data centres – Like other search engines, Google uses tens of thousands of servers, each of which are part of a larger cluster of computers. In turn, these clusters form part of a data centre collecting the data derived from the search engine spiders. Google merges the results of this collected data together every few weeks and publishes it in the Google search.
As each of Google’s data centres contains several thousand servers, it is effectively acting as an independent branch of Google. Therefore, getting different results from the same data centre, every time you click refresh, is to be expected.
2) Google’s use of geo-targeting – Google’s data centres are geographically dispersed so that the queries are served to the data centre within the closest proximity. As each data centre acts as an independent branch of Google, you will find that searches conducted in different countries or areas may return a variation of results.
Google’s results accessed from differing data centres will be similar but the perpetually updating index and Google’s use of geo-targeting will ensure that they are not necessarily identical. So if you and your clients are looking at slightly different Google results then don’t panic, as all your competitors are in the same Google boat.