So why is Google giving different results from different locations,
for different word orders (when the search is supposed to not care
about word order)?
Hateful.
Google does lots of individual customization of searches. It even
associates you with past searches and gears current searches based on
those, and what you clicked on.
Plus, what in the world makes you think there is one single master
list to be searched against? Everything I've read indicates that it's
all highly distributed and replicated, etc. etc. Besides, it's not
like there's a right answer to a search query.
Darrell