Or rather, are the results you get from searching a particular term the same for everyone? I’ve never done any real analysis on this from multiple computers at once, but I’m fairly certain I’ve typed in the same terms on different computers within say, 12 hours of each other and gotten different results. I mostly filed it as search results changing as the internet changes (i.e. new news articles popping up, pages appearing etc), but the odd thing is the results SEEM to be tailored closer towards what I search for more on that computer, though this may be confirmation bias.
I wouldn’t be surprised if based on your Google ad cookies, browser history, IP etc were taken into account and used to search results so that someone like me may get more video game results or something. Not that the results are VASTLY different, but I think that the first few pages may be skewed towards your interests, meaning that on my home computer video game things may get “moved up” a few search results, whereas on my laptop/work computer more technical articles or computer science topics get moved up more.
Searching for information on Google’s algorithms is a pain, unfortunately, it’s hard to tell if anyone else has noticed this.
This question came up in one of my first threads at SDMB:
Google does vary its results almost unpredictably (which I find annoying). In this case, I don’t think it’s cookies or other Google secrets, but just geographical switching based on ISP. I got same results with another machine, BUT a very different list when I accessed Google search through an anonymizing proxy server! In that search the septet I think I spoiled for you was #1, the one with a possible word from “Septet L” was #2, my “septet I” was #3, and the #1-2-5 septet Google is so proud of for my region (though I’d never heard of it) didn’t even make the Top 10.
Yes, I suppose I should be able to figure out what country you live in, if you keep posting Google search ranks! There is no privacy anymore, get over it. :eek:
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(But last time I tried such an experiment with this server, it failed to cope with Google’s scripting. Anyone know a better free proxy server ?)
BTW, the post above links to a thread of riddles, some of which haven’t yet been Spoilered!
Not only that, but it’s my understanding that Google rolls out changes and improvements to a small portion of servers first. If nothing bad happens over the next several weeks, and the results are what they expected, they implement the change everywhere.
I did the search for “guns” and all but one of the results on the first page were gun dealers or smiths, several of them local. There was a big map showing how many gun stores are nearby. The only other result was the Wikipedia article on “Gun”.