Which Google IP Is Delivering Your Results
Some of the longer WMW threads tend to be the ignorant instructing the ill-informed. The "data centre watch" threads have been going on for months and reach several hundreds of posts.
It turns out that many of the posters have no idea as to how they find out which IP address they are getting their results from. Many believe that mousing over the "cache" on Serps tells you that. (any TW reader believing that should go to the back of the class)
Tedster delivers a good post on this datacenter watch thread that tells you exactly how to find the IP number delivering your Serps. And incidentally tells you the very useful FF extension to use.
If you hover over the "cache" link, you find the IP that will serve the cached page, which is not necessarily the IP address that served your search results.If you use the command line to ping Google, you will get the IP address at that moment, but it can change in an instant when you do the next search, although it is usually stable for a period of time and a relatively safe approach.
If certainty on the IP address of any page is important, you can use a Firefox extension called "ShowIP" that displays the IP address (or addresses!) for the currently displayed page. The IP information is coming directly from the browser in present time and is displayed in a small extra window on the status bar.
Using that Firefox ShowIP extension, I see that my current Google search results page (going to www.google.com) is actually being pieced together from these three IP addresses:
64.233.161.104
64.233.161.147
64.233.161.99However, the cache pages are coming from a fourth, different IP address.
If I enter any one of these three above IP addresses directly into the address bar, I get search results from that single IP only, rather than a page pieced together from all three. All the cache links stay on that IP address.
There is another difference as well -- the "google.com" page has the basic Google logo. But the direct IP address page has the gray text "English" at the bottom right of the logo.
Or you can just ping
Or you can just ping www.google.com from your PC...
Search a few more pages, and ping it again.. That's the IP you are using.
ALl the above is really unnecessary. But that's just me.
Very handy extension
Perfect for finding more of your competitor's sites.
Time Spent Better Elsewhere
I feel like people spent too much time comparing the different data centers, and worrying about today versus yesterday. When there is a major update, it will be well documented on all the big forums, so it is best just to find something else to do with your time.
Pinging sometimes isn't as reliable as usual
I have had my ip change from search to search (matter of 10 seconds) ... so my 10 second old ping doesn't count anymore :)
.. unsettling sometimes because you like wanted to see that weird datacenter again..
Better yet
Even better yet, forget it altogether. How can you can control what a third party does? This obsession with data center watching is starting to seem out of touch with the reality of the constantly fluxing Google I see.
The missing link.....
I can see Tedster's point of view, but I felt that there was more to it than that and set about finding out exactly what it was...
The missing link in all this is the "new" gfe-xx.google.com addresses that Google has managed to keep hidden all this time.
See this discussion about Google Datacenter IP addresses for a lot more information on this (especially on Page 2 of the thread).