Spanky's Place :: Google Search Results differ between browsers

I was playing with search results with Google, and I entered the following search term:

Lotus Notes Fiscal Year Formula

Firefox and Netscape both gave the same results (at least for the first page -I didn't bother checking additional pages), but Microsoft Internet Explorer came up with really different results. For MSIE, I did check additional pages, and my site didn't show up in the first 21 pages of results -after that, I gave up.

Below are some links that will display screen shots (sized down a bit) so you can see my results. All shots were taken from the same machine, on the same network connection, within 1 minute of each other. Note: The links will open in new windows.

So, can anybody give me an idea as to why this would occur? I figured that Google's search algorithms were pretty much platform/browser agnostic, but it appears that they are not.

-Devin

Wowsers! A Tag Cloud!

Comments

1 - I think you are missing an alternative. Is it really that Firefox is different than Internet Explorer? I don't think so, because both Firefox and Internet Explorer give the same results for me, and they are the results Internet Explorer gave you. I think a more interesting process is going on. I think Google is checking your bookmarks or history or something like that. Do you normally use Firefox? I bet you do, so that is where your history, etc. are stored.

This would be a fairly dramatic finding, in my humble opinion. Good for ego surfing to have your sites hit first, but lousy for people who want to understand where their sites really hit on the web. We should dig deeper into this.

Posted by Ben Langhinrichs At 07:28:03 PM On 02/13/2006 | - Website - |

2 - What you call ego surfing, I call "market research".

Firefox is my regular browser. I pretty much only use MSIE on sites that require ActiveX controls or use code like "document.all". I clean out my local cache farely often, so I doubt it could be caused by cache issues.

I use Netscape very rarely, usually only to test how stuff looks/runs in that browser. If Google were basing my results on bookmarks/history, I think that the "odd man out" would be Firefox -unless of course both Netscape and Firefox share this information due to a common Mozilla codebase. However, I really doubt that.

I just had an idea (yes, I treated it gently so it wouldn't die of lonlieness): I launched Netscape & set it to render sites like MSIE does (Tools|Options|Site Controls|Site List tab), and ran the search again. The results were the same as MSIE.

This is really interesting. I think you are right, this may be worth digging into.

Oh, and if you believe I managed to write the first sentence of this entry and maintain a straight face, I might have some land to sell you.

Posted by Devin At 09:01:29 PM On 02/13/2006 | - Website - |

3 - Hmm, perhaps it was a cache issue after all. I just re-ran the search in all three browsers, and am now getting the results I was earlier getting from MSIE.

-Devin

Posted by Devin At 09:14:29 PM On 02/13/2006 | - Website - |

4 - There has to be something more than cache going on. I get inconsistent results for various searches, not on the hits for my site directly, but on those hits surrounding my hits. For example, search for "doclinks". The third and fourth hits will be my website, but the fourth is Eric Mack's site and the fifth is a post in the Notes 4 & 5 forum. At least, that is true on Firefox on my main machine. On Internet Explorer, the fourth site is called MCMLinks and the fifth site is a DominoPower article. The sixth site is Eric Mack's site.

Posted by Ben Langhinrichs At 09:44:04 PM On 02/13/2006 | - Website - |

5 - Oh wait, I did find a difference depending on whether Safe Search was set to moderate or no restrictions. Could that be what is happening? What is your Safe Search preference set to?

Posted by Ben Langhinrichs At 09:45:05 PM On 02/13/2006 | - Website - |

6 -

Interesting results on this end. I went to Google using all three browsers (after first clearing my cache & history), and set my preferences to no restrictions. I then submitted a search for doclinks

Both MSIE & Netscape (in either Firefox or MSIE rendering mode) display the same results:

DocLinks (bcs.bedfordstmartins.com/...)
Henretta, America's History, 5e - Content (indented from previous)
Doclinks UK (members.tripod.com/...)
Genii Software | BlogNew (www.geniisoft.com)
Genii Software | BlogNew (indented from previous)
Eric Mack On-Line (www.ericmaconline.com)
Notes/Domino 4 and 5 Forum: Doclinks (LDD site)
etc...

Firefox, however, displays this: (differences noted)

DocLinks (bcs.bedfordstmartins.com/...)
Doclinks UK (members.tripod.com/...) this was 3rd in other browsers
Genii Software | BlogNew (www.geniisoft.com) this was 4th in other browsers
Genii Software | BlogNew (indented from previous) this was 5th in other browsers
McMLinks - DocLinks (mcm-links.com/...) this wasn't listed in the other browsers
Tools for working with Notes Doclinks (www.dominopower.com/issues/...) nor was this
Eric Mack On-Line (www.ericmaconline.com) this was 6th in the other browsers
etc...

Granted, I could be intrepreting these results incorrectly, but it does appear to me that Google is sensing the browser being used, and giving different results for different browsers. For what purpose, I have absolutely no idea.

Posted by Devin At 11:09:15 PM On 02/13/2006 | - Website - |

7 -

Perhaps I have managed to offend the folks at Google. I just tried this search:
lotus notes fiscal year site:www.devinolson.net

and got a single result, that didn't even link to the correct page. Or perhaps, I think more likely, something has changed in the way Google spiders through Blogsphere sites. I just recently upgraded the design to Blogsphere V2 Beta 8. I wonder if this upgrade has somehow managed to break Google's indexing system.

Gonna have to look into this.

Posted by Devin Olson At 03:40:40 PM On 02/14/2006 | - Website - |

8 -

I am experiencing different Google search results between 2 different computers.

Mac - Safari, Firefox, IE (all Browsers show the same search results on my Mac)
Windows - IE, Firefox, Opera (all Browsers show the same search results on my Windows-PC)

All my Google settings are identical in all of these Browsers (I have double checked this many times) + I'm always using the main Google search page.

The theory about different search histories on different computers, would mean that search histories on one computer are accessed across the different Browsers. Is that possible?

Also, my bookmarks are different in each browser - if this is influencing the results, why are the cross-browser results the same on each of the 2 computers?

By the way, in each browser I cleared/deleted the cache, the cookies, the history and all saved information --- BUT the Google search results are still different between my 2 maschines!

The only difference between my Mac and my Windows-PC, besides the obvious, is that they have different IP addresses and different connections to the Internet. Could this lead to different search results?

Anyway, as I am involved with search optimization for my company's web site these different results are very frustrating and make my reports seem highly inaccurate.

Linnea

Posted by Linnea At 12:12:30 PM On 03/14/2006 | - Website - |

9 - Hey there Linnea.

(Your post had escaped html in it, I went ahead and cleaned it up for readability).

Your results a similar to those that I've been hearing about from several other people. Unfortunately, at this point, I don't have any solid answers.

I think it is becoming more and more aparrent that Google's search results are quite often different from one machine to another, and from one browser to another. I don't know why this is; but the fact that it is repeatable by many differening users leads me to believe that it is not due to a quirk in the end user's system.

So the next question (at least for me) to ask, is WHY? Are the different results due to some deliberate code on the part of Google, or are they due to analomous code?

Truthfully, I don't even know where to begin to try to find the answer to that question.

-Devin

Posted by Devin Olson At 02:10:57 PM On 03/17/2006 | - Website - |