e.g. the search of another article "set up Google Sheets APIs (and treat Sheets like a database)"
turns up my site and a couple Twitter threads talking about it (plus a phishing site which has scraped and republished it). I presume that will stay the same b/c it's such a specific title phrase (but not because searches are necessarily deterministic)
For example, try searching the following string in quotes: "the SERP should stay the same".
https://www.google.com/search?q=%22the%20SERP%20should%20sta...
Now, the logical presumption, assuming Google works as people say it does, is that each result will contain that exact string. If no results contain the string, then you should receive no results.
However, for me, results are returned. Did each of the results from that search contain this exact string? For me, they did not.
`No results found for "the SERP should stay the same".`
Then defaults to providing the SERP for the fallback query:
`Results for the SERP should stay the same (without quotes):`
That SERP should change when this HN thread is indexed though
Even that list of search engines are reducing now.
Do you believe you can get consistent results with any search?
For example, if we pick some uncommon search terms will we get the same results on the first search, the second search, the third, etc. Or will the results change?
I did a search with some terms from one of the comments in this thread, in quotes. The first search returned only one result: this thread.
As I searched the same quoted terms repeatedly along with additional terms, more results were returned that contained the exact string of original terms. Surprised by this, I tried a search with only the original terms, in quotes, once again. This time the search returned more than just the one result.