I'm trying to understand the relationship between what the datacenters report and what is actually displayed when you do a live search. For one of my keyword terms, my website shows up on a live google searches as ranked #1, but when I run a search on one of the datacenter check tools, this site consistently shows up as #38 or #39 across the board. I've tested this from different computers and different IP addresses (obviously not logged in to my google account) and for the life of me I can't figure out why this site would be #1 when I do a search, but #39 when I check them on the datacenters. Any ideas how/why this is happening?
Each Google datacenter runs a slightly different ranking algorithm so it's not uncommon to see ranking differences between each individual datacenter. I suspect that Google uses some kind of algorithm that polls ranking data across all the data centers and creates a ranking for that particular keyword.