Why search engine results different from one person to the next?

Brisbane website developers are well aware that two people can have different search results using the same keywords. This can also happen when you perform the same search on a PC and a smart phone and whilst it can be annoying to some people, if your website is on page 1 on a PC and on page 3 on a smartphone, suddenly it becomes much more than simply annoying.

As a web design company in Brisbane, it’s this incongruity between search results that often concerns our clients, as they don’t understand why their website can show up on different pages of the serps (search result pages), between different devices and searchers.

Understanding how search engines search for information

The problem is that Google wants to deliver the most relevant search results to users, and as fast as possible. So it has developed deep neural networks that are designed to think like a human brain (or at least to try and think like a human brain), and these are used all over the internet to improve the user experience; this approach is called ‘deep learning’.

So when you search for ‘Brisbane web development’, your results are based not only on your keywords, but also on your search history, as well as what other people are searching for online and which sites have content that closely resembles what the search engine ‘thinks’ you want.

Google can also change the order of the results it shows you, depending on the device you are using. So for example, if you are using a smartphone and one of the websites that matches your keyword query for ‘Brisbane web development’ isn’t mobile friendly, it will downgrade that result with a lower ranking and show you more mobile friendly results. On your PC, this won’t be a problem, so this is one reason why you might see different results on different devices.

Another reason that you might see different results in the serps is due to your location and whether or not you are logged into your Google accounts. Google preferentially presents search results based on your location and also uses data from your various Google accounts to refine the results it presents to you.

A trick that website developers often use in Brisbane to overcome these problems is to use a browser’s ‘private’ searching mode, use a different browser, clear the browsing history and cookies from your cache, log out of your Google account and turn off your location data.

If you need help from a web development company in Brisbane, why not get an instant quote online?

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