For a particular few keywords I have been checking in Y! - I have noticed VASTLY different rankings from 2 different computers I check - namely my place, and my office 15 min walk a way. At first I thought there may have been an update in progress (eg, using one PC which was getting updated results and the other old results) and that they would line up again some time soon. However that was like 3 weeks ago now and I am still seeing these completely different results on these 2 PCs. WTF is going on here? Anybody else experiencing something like it?
On each PC, do an `nslookup www.yahoo.com` to see which Yahoo datacenter you are hitting. P.S. Thanks suzigeek!
Thanks, the computer which I notice my "preferred result set" on returns the following (will check the other later today/tomorrow): nslookup www.yahoo.com *** Can't find server name for address 192.168.0.1: Non-existent domain Server: ns4.on.net Address: 192.231.203.3 Non-authoritative answer: Name: www.yahoo.akadns.net Addresses: 66.94.230.48, 66.94.230.44, 66.94.230.45, 66.94.230.40 66.94.230.38, 66.94.230.75, 66.94.230.50, 66.94.230.49 Aliases: www.yahoo.com Does that mean anything to anyone?
Yes, it means that my idea didn't work. It's telling you a bunch of possible Yahoo datacenters, but not necessarily the exact one to which you are connecting. I will think more on this after I return from the dentist.
By loading the Yahoo.com homepage at the same time as I was running a `netstat -a` command, I found the actual server behind the Yahoo URL -- I think. The p1 through p25 work in place of p5, so I'm seeing at least 25 servers. My question is, does everyone see the dcn subdomain, or are other areas served by other subdomains? I'm thinking that dcn stands for "data center network" and perhaps Yahoo has only 25 datacenters. If this is the case, then it is possible to check your SERPS in all 25 of Yahoo's datacenters from either of those computers. I am enheartened by the fact that each of the pXX servers appears to have only one IP address.
LOL, well that one went a mile over my head. Still confused as to why I am seeing 2 vastly different sets of results STILL - coming up to 4 weeks now.
So, I did some testing, starting with the above data. All 26 of these IP addresses seem to be Yahoo data centers. 66.94.230.32 66.94.230.33 66.94.230.34 66.94.230.35 66.94.230.36 66.94.230.37 66.94.230.38 66.94.230.39 66.94.230.40 66.94.230.41 66.94.230.42 66.94.230.43 66.94.230.44 66.94.230.45 66.94.230.46 66.94.230.47 66.94.230.48 66.94.230.49 66.94.230.50 66.94.230.51 66.94.230.52 66.94.230.53 66.94.230.70 66.94.230.71 66.94.230.72 66.94.230.75 Kinda looks like it. Trouble is, they don't return the same address after a query, so you don't know which data center is responding. Is there any way to read a given data center? Then we have to figure out who the Yahoo equivalent "Big Daddy" is.
I have question with regard to the datacenters. Which servers do they use? is it apache or iis ? It is important for me because I think that different configurations give different results.