If you are a site owner, part of your duties include accurately tracking the search engine position or placement of you web pages. The goal being to have your web pages appear on the first page as close to position #1 as possible.

The key word here being ACCURATE. There are several things that can skew the accuracy of what you see when searching a search engine by keyword which include:

  • Web browser history files. Google and other search engines try to assist its searchers by personalizing the search results you see and accomplish this objective via cookies and other browsing history related data.
  • Your IP address. Different search results are displayed to different countries. Usually the difference is not huge, none-the-less ...