Have a look at these two google pages. Anyone know what the difference is and who would see which? http://209.85.173.104/ http://www.google.com I find they give completely different results.
When I was checking the SERPs for a particular search term, a particular site showed up in position 3 in one data center, and 126 in the other. Holy cow, what is going on here! How can their data centers be giving such dramatically different results. Sometimes I wonder if they know what they are doing anymore. It's like the complexity is overtaking their ability to give accurate results, especially with all the tweaking and sniffing they do to try and eliminate black hat manipulation of the SERPs. I'm sure it is all this tweaking and sniffing that makes the results so wildly variable at times as this never seems to happen with the other search engines. I think I'm going to give up on Google, and focus on other forms of advertising. It's much more of a pain than it's worth to keep playing this game.
I live in the UK where we have a town called Boston. Yes the same as in the USA. If we searched for "Boston Football Club" I would expect our local club to be high on the rankings and any "Boston Football Club" in the USA to be down the rankings, unless I added usa to the search. However I would imagine if you live in North East USA and did a search for "Boston Football Club" you would expect to see your local club first and ours back down in postion 126. This is why you need different data centres. Chances are the regional difference between the two data centers you have found are dictating the results. In better words just focus on what you or your customers see, not whats happening elsewhere in the world.
Well explained, can't see the "caos" some people don't stop to talk about either. Most of my searches show highly relevant results on Google - most times better than any of the competition does.