The team I'm working with has noticed a wild fluctuation in the number of search results we're getting. A search of a name went from a couple million results to a couple hundred thousand results back up to around 750,000 results all within the course of one month. We tried the search on several different computer setups and several different browsers. Any ideas as to why this is happening?

You're probably just hitting different data centers. If your site is new to the Google index, I'd recommend you wait for a month or two and see what happens.

It's not a new site. We were searching the name of a business author. I'm not familiar with what you're referring to with "hitting different data centers." If you'd prefer not to explain, could you direct me to where I could research this? Thanks!

Basically, Google has hundreds of servers (data centers) which can all have slightly different indexes and, therefore, may give different results. Some can be a bit behind the others, which could explain why you see different results at different times. And since Google constantly updates their index, there's always some fluctuation in the number of search results anyway. I guess that could be one explanation for what you saw...

Thanks for the information!