Google “Do you mean…?” Results Baffling

Lately I’ve noticed that the “Do you mean keyword?” results in Google vary quite a bit from a toolbar or search box search. For instance, let’s take a search for “rayban sunglasses” as an example. Most folks search for “ray ban sunglasses” (with the brand name as two words), but there is still a large number of searchers looking for the brand name as a single word.

Here’s what I get as I write this:

You’ll see that the Ray Ban sunglasses catalog page for FramesDirect.com comes up #3. Nice, but notice the “Do you mean ray ban sunglasses?” link at the top.

Click on that and you’ll get this:

Still a nice #3 ranking, right? Well, maybe not. Do the exact same search for “ray ban sunglasses” in the Google search bar:

This is what happens. A totally different result:

The FramesDirect.com page drops to position 6.

At first, I thought this might simply be a case of different data servers serving up different results in much the same way you can get different results from search bar searching. But, it appears to be consistent. Each and every time I click on a “Do you mean…?” link I will get one result and then a totally different one from a search bar query.

Is Google favoring pages in the “Do you mean…” links for some reason? I tried this in several different browsers (Firefox, IE7, Opera, Safari), not signed into Google with cleared caches and get the same actions every time.

Curious…