hummingwolf | Sunday, February 19th, 2006

Does anybody out there know why

dcjensen and I would be getting wildly different results from the same search on Google? Neither of us is using safe search and we're both using the US version of Google, so it isn't something that obvious. The reason I ask is that he did a search for "hummingwolf" and got "Results 1-50 of about 35,700 for hummingwolf," while my results for the same search are more like 550. We also got different results for the phrase "hellmouth cafe," though those numbers were much closer.

Differences between us: he's on broadband, I'm on dial-up (with AOL, even, though I do not use the AOL window); he's signed in to his Google account, I'm just anonymous. Would either of those things make a difference in our search results?

Edit: Using anonymizer, I was getting slightly higher results at first, till I chose to "repeat the search with the omitted results included," then jumped to page 28 of those results. On the regular Google page, non-anonymized, it tells me "Results 271 - 280 of about 440 for hummingwolf." On the anonymizer version, it says "Results 271 - 280 of about 35,600 for hummingwolf." What's going on here?

Jumping to results page 44 then gives me only very slightly different results: a final 438 versus 439.

Edit again: Dan gets the same results I do on www.google.cn (557). But on www.google.ch our results diverge again--559 for me and 35,700 for him.