Sometimes it happens when I am talking to clients and they look at one set in Google while I see a different set. It is the exact same search term. It has been a problem in the past because we have used different datacenters to access the index when Google is updating it. It’s never a problem because I have just changed to accessing the same datacenter as my client by typing http://64.233.161.107 or whatever my client’s datacenter IP address happens to be at the time, into the address bar of my browser.
Although I’ve only encountered one additional problem, I know that it will be more frequent. My client logs into their Google Account. They are being shown personalized search results that I can’t duplicate. I had to have my client sign out of his account when this happened. This could be a pain, so I also had to ensure that I was signed out from my Google account.
Recently, I found myself being a fiddler’s eagle when signing in to my Google account. Matt Cutts gave the hint at a conference. He mentioned that personalized search can be disabled for certain queries by adding the parameter “&pws=0” to your query string. This is a nice feature, but it needs to be done ‘under the skin’.