Google's tricks
Ever wonder how fast Google produces search results. Evidently, Google has several servers (rather datacenters, DC) spread all over globe, and depending on host of factors (like perhaps query-load?), one or other returns results when asked. Thus far, this was a fairly accurate guess.
What now seems revealing is that Google's search results change constantly. That is to say, if first 3 search results now for a query belong to URLs' A, B and C, it is very possible that similar query after awhile would throw up different results that show first 3 positions belonging to say C, A and an altogether new URL. Why this 'anomaly'?
The datacenters
To answer the question I'll take you to what PhilC has to say in this SEO forum. I quote below:
"Google has quite a few separate datacenters (DCs), each of which contain the entire index and the entire algorithms. To all intents and purposes, they are independent of each other. They don't all contain identical indexes, and they don't all contain identical algorithms (programs that do the rankings). It means that they often produce different results to each other.
When you do a search, you get the results from whatever datacenter Google chooses at that time. Unless you search a specific DC's IP address, Google chooses the DC to return the results from, and they choose it with every search you make, including when you click to get the next page of results. It's not uncommon for the next page of results to be provided by a different DC than the previous page of results."
Does it affect?
You bet it does. According to studies by Professor Thorsten Joachims and colleagues at Cornell University, The Power of Defaults, as many as 42% of users click on top search hit, and 8% click the second hit.
Catch-22 situation, did you say? Well, it really is so. It's clear no matter how hard one tries to optimize web-page for Google, a top search position is never a guarantee. And if not, ... you know what!
Yahoo! admits
Given Google's hither and thither, Yahoo!'s 'capitulation' further rises hackles. What did Yahoo! say?
Chief Financial Officer, Susan Decker has this to say in an interview. "We don't think it's reasonable to assume we're going to gain a lot of share from Google. It's not our goal to be No. 1 in Internet search. We would be very happy to maintain our market share."
Though apprehended widely, it wasn't before Yahoo! publicly acknowledged Google's supremacy that people have started to sit up and take a renewed hard look at what the future may await.
Whither SEO practitioners
It's tough out there. Increasingly so. Google's tricks recent crackdown on BMW and Ricoh is an important pointer. It'll be interesting to see how the SEO experts go about in coming days in this changed scenario
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