Does any one know why my site is #5 at the beginning of the day up to 2pm GMT and then foes to #3 after 2 pm? I am not logged into any thing Google, so it shouldn't be picking up what Ive looked at previously. This is really odd.
Google is constantly updating their index. It takes time to roll it out to all of the servers. In addition they test different indexes on different servers. So sometimes you'll get one set of results then see something else the next time you search. If your time based query happens every day then I'm guessing that Google is testing different sites for a specific time period to see which ones perform better.
freelistfool talks the truth. I have had this happen many times, most of the time it results in an embarassment on my part. I have since learned to stop boasting to my clients about the positions I have newly got their site too.
Not only do that change the index often, they also have multiple servers with results that are a little bit different.
this happens to us quite often too. one minute we're on 64 then 65, or 67 and so on and so forth. but today we really had a big jump from page 7 to page 2.