I have some websites that I have created in the last little bit (mostly just boring static HTML for simplicity). I have been tracking them to figure out when/how they will appear on Google. Well, I've searched from work, and the page doesn't appear at all. It's been several weeks, and I've cross-posted the pages all over trying to make sure Google finds them. The other night, my home machine found the page with no problem. 1st page, 1st link, even! How amazing! I came to work, and my work machine has a different result. So, I had someone else here search; they also didn't find it. However, their result was different from mine! I even ran the search via my PDA; I found my page on the first page first link.
It sorta looked like this:
| Location |
Result |
| Home Machine 1 |
1st Page |
| Home Machine 2 |
Not at all |
| Work |
Not at all |
| PDA |
1st Page |
| Sheri's work |
Not at all |
| Chris' work |
1st Page |
So, I began to wonder why. I asked our optimization expert at work (yes, we've a dev whose whole job is to place our site 1st page, 1st link), and here's a summary of what he said:
"Your site seems to be new so don't expect your place to always remain constant. Google has multiple data centers and will move people from one to another to allow for updates so each one can show different results. You are #1 on MSN, #51 on Yahoo and greater than 100 on google. You can check all the datacenters here. If you still see yoruself on google tonight let me know because that should be very short lived."
Somehow, this inconsistent results across multiple machines seems odd. Does this make sense to anyone?