Why is IMPORTFROMGOOGLE not returning the expected results?

The Google Search Results depend on multiple factors like user location, search history, and personalization settings. Because of this, it can happen that the results you see on the Google Search page differs from the results that you get with IMPORTFRFOMGOOGLE. The results won’t be completely different but you might notice some minor differences.

The best you can do to approximate the SERP you have is to use the full URL in the IMPORTFROMGOOGLE function.

For example, Instead of 

= IMPORTFROMGOOGLE(“Hiking shoes”)

do

=IMPORTFROMGOOGLE(“https://www.google.com/search?q=Hiking+shoes&sca_esv=591835653&sxsrf=AM9HkKkFfbbj0PpfttrJ99AOVwW_rHV5UA%3A1702899669800&source=hp&ei=1S-AZbvVLuWIkdUPhpqIGA&sclient=gws-wiz“)

For further clarity and to see the Google Search Results page as fetched by our scraper, you can refer to this article.