Why Do Search Engines Produce Different Results?

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Algorithms
All search engines work in a similar basic manner, but there are differences in the algorithms used. An algorithm is a programming tool used to solve a problem or find an answer.

Imagine All The Data
Imagine for a moment the vast amount of data contained on the internet. Some search engines only index a small proportion of the pages they find. Each search engine has a different way of examining the data, and of indexing it.

Human Error
Huge numbers of man hours have been invested by the major search engines in an attempt to improve the relevance of the matches they find, and the order in which they present the results.
Search engines which consistently produced large numbers of low relevance matches would find their numbers of users dwindling (or maybe they would need to spend more on advertising!), and would eventually go out of business.
Perhaps we should all avoid the search engines which spend the most on advertising?

Subjectivity
All the search engines would hope to list the highest relevance matches before less relevant ones, but relevance itself may be quite subjective, so it's not surprising that the same search on different search engines often produces different results.