Different rankings when same terms entered by different people

Okay, I rank number one (and two) on Google, for a particularly hot term. I'm visiting the east Coast, call my wife in California and say "enter (particularly hot term) in Google." I come up way down on page one for her. I send here the link to the page I am viewing. I still come up way down the page. What the...?

 

Yeah, googles weird, I'll click on a search term someone just came to my site with and I'll not see my site anywhere.

 

There is a function call personal search.
http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/050628-073541

 

u might wanna use seeadwords.com to see google results from different place.

 

It seems to be a normal occurrence. To my knowledge it has to do with one facet of geographic IP targeting.

Basically, the idea is that Google would alter the search results showing area-specific sites (that might in Google's opinion have a very narrow geographic focus) when a keyword is searched from a particular IP address.

For instance, if one is looking to buy running shoes and search for "buy running shoes" Google's results might be different for people searching in New York or San Francisco as the keyword above does not contain an area request, but rather a generic "buy running shoes" request.

When Google sees such a generic request it tries to determine searcher’s IP address and will try to provide some local shop’s URLs along with nation-wide chains.

Now, the more specific is the request (for instance “buy running shoes in Dallas TX”) the less jumps in the SERPs one will see.

 

They could be hitting different data centres or like it was mentioned above, they show different results to people in different geographic locations.

 

Thanks everyone. I've been traveling but am keeping an eye on the thread. Your answers have been very helpful and have certainly made me question some things about search marketing. If you can't know your rank...