I happen to notice something scary yesterday and thought it was worth documenting.  If anyone out there has any insight as to what might cause something like this, please share.  I’m hoping to get some feedback from Matt Cutts through his blog or the Google Webmaster forum.

When searching from two separate computers on the same network within Google for the keyword phrase "website video sales people" I get completely difference numbers in reference to how many pages Google states are within Google’s index for this particular search phrase.

Google has many datacenters and index numbers will vary as they are estimates, however, seeing a difference of 8 million makes me raise an eyebrow.

Here is the second result:

Notice how for the same search phrase the first shows 8 million and the second shows 16 million?  Is Google just giving throwing numbers at us now?  As an internet marketing firm and others as well, this number is used to differentiate how competitive each keyword is that we’re targeting.

What could cause this?  Both browsers are firefox and there are a few components installed on each but for the most part are the same.  Could a browser function cause different data to be pulled?  Does this value warrant what Google and others say it is, which represents how many pages within Google index are currently competing for this keyword phrase?  Is there a firefox plugin that will show you which datacenter your connected to?  This would be the only way to truly measure.