[brudgers]

It's just worse in different ways (and better in different ways as well). As Google's index grows it shards across more machines. The odds that latency will affect the result of a particular query increase simply because more machines and network connections are involved. So there's caching.

Because no one wants to wait forever (delay is indistinguishable from failure), Google returns the best results it can obtain within some time threshold. Unfortunately, the utility of a search term is often its rarity relative to other search terms and the rarity of a search term makes it less likely to be cached nearby. If "nobody ever searches by that term" it is more likely not to be indexed or on a far away partition. Think of adding a Korean character to a string of English search terms : In Korea : In the US.