Some interesting Google articles,

The first article is about spotted differences when doing the same search on different times. The second article is about capitalization issues.

http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/018394.html
http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/018390.html

I consistently get fewer results if I search for [cafE] than if I search for [cafe] or [café].

I think what's happening is that the uppercase E is matching against 'E' and 'e' but not 'é', whereas the lowercase e is matching against all three.

Roger, I get more results when searching for [cafE] than searching for [cafe] at this moment ("about 33,600,000" vs "about 375,000,000 for cafE" actually). I think it might be just connected to that you may randomly hit on different data centers when you perform different queries, and while Google seemingly is case-insensitive, different cases in a query still are considered different when it comes to data centers/ perhaps caching. I guess it's still true that the Google page count is often highly off...

[OT] Nice icon, WebSonic.nl :)

Thnx! indeed, it looks good, thnx Philipp!

I do not think it is a matter of server differences.
Try searching the following: cafe -cafE

   http://www.google.com/search?q=cafe+-cafE

When I did the search, all ten results on the front page had
either "café" of "Café".

Yes, now I'm also getting "café" results even when I search for "cafE", and the "definition" link is back too, so it sounds like a data center issue as Philipp and George have suggested.

Surprisingly it seems to get the same results for the following:

   http://www.google.com/search?q=cafe+-cafE
   http://www.google.com/search?q=cafE+-cafe

The following produces different results on the first serp.
It includes one actually containing "cafe -café".

   http://www.google.com/search?q=cafe+-café

Below are some more combinations.

   http://www.google.com/search?q=café+-cafe
   http://www.google.com/search?q=cafE+-café
   http://www.google.com/search?q=café+-cafE
   http://www.google.com/search?q=cafe+-café+-cafE (0 results)

Google does so much processing "behind the scenes" (e.g. expanding the query to include synonyms) that the results now appear quite non-deterministic to the outside user.

I wonder also, whether Google does more processing (i.e. "tries harder") at times when their systems are lightly loaded, and returns simpler faster results when their systems are busy. It would make sense.

In the case of the search [cafe -café], I said that one of the results actually contained "cafe -café". Although this is true, it was in the title, not in a snippet. The title was presumably not an existing page title, but a title generated on behalf of Google Video in response to that query.