Basically, through searching, I found that Google was treating queries differently depending on whether or not the words in the search phrase were capitalized or not.

According to Google, they don’t treat the queries different:

Capitalization

Google searches are NOT case sensitive. All letters, regardless of how you type them, will be understood as lower case. For example, searches for george washington, George Washington, and gEoRgE wAsHiNgToN will all return the same results.

Which I think is funny because as of TODAY, gEoRgE wAsHiNgToN and george washington have a difference of 1,000,000 in the serps:

Results 1 – 10 of about 57,000,000 for george washington

and

Results 1 – 10 of about 58,000,000 for gEoRgE wAsHiNgToN

The results look the same, but you can’t help but wonder why that serp count is so far off.

I took two screenshots of Attorney/Lawyer related searches to illustrate this as well:

new york lawyers

New York Lawyers

This illustrates the difference in the results (not big, not like it was this summer) as well as the serp count.