Barry via Search Engine Land - Last night, during the Webmaster Help Group chat session, the question was brought up in the Q&A box. John Muller of Google was the first Googler to admit that Google may, on some occasions, take case into account on a search result. I have posted the Q&A transcript, so let me quote it for you:
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Hi Barry! It looks like I may have been a bit too fast in answering that one :-). At the moment, as far as I know, we do not look at case sensitivity in web search. However, at some time in the future, we may decide to take it into account should we find that it is relevant and improves the quality of our results. If you see differences at the moment, it is likely due to normal fluctuations and perhaps differences across datacenters. If you find drastic differences, it would be great if you could post them here or better, in the Webmaster Help groups so that we can investigate them appropriately. Thanks for joining us in the chat, I hope you enjoyed it as much as we did!
Thanks John. Still, I am always able to reproduce examples of this. It is very easy, try them yourself.FYI, I updated my story to include your email/sphinn to me.
rustybrick, I suspect that the reordering for your example has more to do with whether some parts of Google’s universal search are returned, e.g. book search results for your George Washington queries.