Are google searches getting very localised and using phone gps data to scramble rank?

[aopo.mark]

Hi,

This morning I had a friend check my rank on his mobile phone. On my home computer, with personalized search turned off and not logged into google, I think that I am in the top five serps, but on his phone I was not on the first two pages for the exact same keyword.

He was checking his phone in the same suburb that I live in, but for some reason it showed that his location was one about ten suburbs away. As we live in a city of 4 million people, the who city is only about 50 km wide at best, yet there is this massive difference in serp ranking.

He speculated that not only is your google places listing being affected by Google algorithms, but Google is tracking your home computer IP (location) or your phones 'apparent' location, and somehow tailoring results to these parameters. The only thing is that the major sites are still ranking at the top and they dont necessarily specialize in the suburb that his phone thought that he was searching in.