Finding impact factor of journals using Google

Question

Recently, I saw someone searching in Google a phrase such as "Econometrica impact factor" or "Quarterly journal of economics impact factor", and it immediately showed the answer in huge digits.

But, when I search the same phrase in my computer, I only see a link to the homepage of the journal, where sometimes I can find its impact factor, sometimes not.

I thought that maybe there is a problem with my Google settings, so I tried to search in Google from a private browser window, but it did not help. I tried both in Firefox and in Chrome and got the same result.

Why does Google behave differently in different computers? And what can I do to have Google return the answer to me?

Answer 1

Short answer

Only Google (the company, actually the people participating on the decision making - implementation processes) can answer why.

Explanation

AFAIK there isn't document publicly available about this specific Google design decision, but assuming that you mean something like "how this works", by one side Google has a lot of domains, by the other side, by default Google (the web search service) redirects users to a regional or localized domain when some conditions are met.

To avoid being redirected you would try http://www.google.com/ncr where ncr stands for no-country-redirect, but this not always work for things like you are looking for.

Another "trick" or "hack" is to include the hl=en parameter-value on the URL. Example

"Original"

Taken from https://www.google.com.mx/search?q=Econometrica+impact+factor few seconds ago.

"Hacked"

Taken from https://www.google.com.mx/search?hl=en&q=Econometrica+impact+factor few seconds ago.

Please note that the results show on the first screen shot are in Spanish, while the second shows results in English. This is because my Google account language is set to use Spanish as the main language.