Dancing with the Data Centers
In order to search the massive amounts of information for a query, search engines use several different data centers to give you your results. If you regularly check a web site’s position in the search engine rankings, you’ve probably noticed that your rankings for a specific keyword phrase may vary, even if your searches are within seconds of one another.
This inconsistency is due to the fact that each data center may yield its own search results. While the information you receive for a given search is ideally the same from data center to center, there are often slight, and occasionally drastic, discrepancies.
For someone trying to optimize their site for higher rankings or specific slots in the search engine results, this can be troubling, especially when one runs across those rare flukes when a site ranking number two in the morning is nowhere to be found in the evening.
When a search engine is updating its indices, it may take days for the change to be uniform. Two searches for the same term can yield two different results: one from a data center that has yet to be updated, and one from a data center that has been. The Google Watch Tool is a convenient way to see how a page ranks for a specific search in the different data centers, viewing up to a hundred results.
While I have yet to a see a similar tool for Yahoo!, MSN or other search engines, you can view the results for the different data centers by pinging the engine repeatedly for the different IPs. A list of Yahoo!’s IPs is available at http://www.vaughns-1-pagers.com/internet/yahoo-data-centers.htm.
This inconsistency is due to the fact that each data center may yield its own search results. While the information you receive for a given search is ideally the same from data center to center, there are often slight, and occasionally drastic, discrepancies.
For someone trying to optimize their site for higher rankings or specific slots in the search engine results, this can be troubling, especially when one runs across those rare flukes when a site ranking number two in the morning is nowhere to be found in the evening.
When a search engine is updating its indices, it may take days for the change to be uniform. Two searches for the same term can yield two different results: one from a data center that has yet to be updated, and one from a data center that has been. The Google Watch Tool is a convenient way to see how a page ranks for a specific search in the different data centers, viewing up to a hundred results.
While I have yet to a see a similar tool for Yahoo!, MSN or other search engines, you can view the results for the different data centers by pinging the engine repeatedly for the different IPs. A list of Yahoo!’s IPs is available at http://www.vaughns-1-pagers.com/internet/yahoo-data-centers.htm.
