Google Juggling

• May. 29, 2002

When you catch Google during the midst of their 4-5 days a month when they have finished spidering and are updating their database a few things happen:

They alternate between www.google.com, www2.google.com and www3.google.com.  At any time and from any browser (originating from any DNS) a search performed at www.google.com could be pulling from any of these.  Switching between servers like this means the results come from different servers at different IP addresses.

Depending on the DNS you originate from you may type in www.google.com and a get a Non-authoritative response from any one of these DNS servers and instantly be bumped to another Google server without even knowing.  This is why results may differ from computer to computer during this time of Google's Updating Cycle.

With 10,000 servers, Google's database does have to become synchronized.  When this happens we get consistent results for a couple weeks, until the next database shuffle occurs.  All this is being done for one reason - so Google can fine tune it's filtering process to ensure its users get the best results, most relevant to the search query performed.

Jason Lane