Google Search Gives Different Results on Different Browsers?

Factual Questions
1

Why do I get different results to searches using Google when I use search engines on different web browsers?

My Mozilla Firefox default homepage has a search box “powered by Google”. I also access Google using Intenet Explorer. But the same search terms submitted to each yield different results, sometimes very different.

Since they’re all powered by Google, why aren’t they the same?

Interestingly, the ones on IE are often more ‘right’ or ‘better’ in my estimation. MF seems to provide more irrelevant results.

2

Google search is very “personalized” now. It returns results based partly on who Google thinks you are, and what you might, therefore, want. At least part of this probably depends on cookies in your browser, but possibly also the browsers very identity. Clear cookies from both browsers and you will probably get more similar results. (Of course, it will still be using you IP address for some of the “personalization” too: for your geographic location, for instance.)

3

While I believe the logic has become more convoluted with time, the underlying methodology for Google’s search algorithm is to look at what you’re searching for, find everyone else who looked for the same thing, look at what links they clicked, and sort the results according to which links got the most clicks.

Of course, you’ll notice that if you search for “restaurants”, it will show restaurants near you, not restaurants in Tokyo, even though there’s a lot more users clicking links in Tokyo.

Google doesn’t just incorporate the terms that you put into the input field to decide which users are searching for the same thing, they also incorporate other metrics that they can find about you - like your location.

Presumably, they could be using your choice of browser as another hidden search term, and thus your results are those that people with that browser have chosen to click more. The results might be worse on Firefox because there’s fewer users overall, and thus less data to prioritize the results by. Or it might be “worse” because Firefox users are more tech savvy and prefer results that are less user friendly but possibly more thorough. I assume it depends on the query.

4

While they might be using browser choice to determine results, I think it’s more likely you are logged into you Google (Gmail, Google+, YouTube) account in one browser and not in the other. Next comes just having used search more often in one browser than the other, and thus Google does a better job knowing what you want in one of them. (This would be especially likely if you have multiple users with different browser preferences.)

5

Just FYI - I’m not logged into a Google account on either browser

6

Could you give some examples of searches that return wildly different results?

7

You still have a Google cookie stored in your browser, which stores info based on everything Google has a hand in. Every page using Google’s ad services, every Youtube video you’ve seen on that computer, every previous Google search you’ve made since you cleared your cookies.

8

Perversely, if you ARE logged in, you can click the little earth icon next to your search results to show you the UN-personalized results. That option doesn’t seem to be available if you’re searching anonymously. In that case, yeah, it probably just cookie tracks you.

9

This is false. Although I think Google does use this sort of information to some extent, these days, it is not its basic “underlying methodology”. Link click popularity was in use by search engines before Google came along, but was not particularly successful in returning more relevant results. Google’s innovation, which is believed still to be the main basis of their PageRank system, was to rank sites according to how many incoming links there were from other sites, and what the content was of the linking text. This proved to provide much better search results than previous methods, and so led to Google’s dominance of the search engine market. I believe nearly all other surviving search engines now use variants of the same technique (although, like Google, they also supplement it with other sorts of information).

10

Well, today I received yet another of those Nigerian scam emails, this time from “mrs. jessica cora”.

I thought I’d check if there was such a person - often scammers use real people’s names.

On Google results 1 & 3 on the first page were scam reports on her name.

On MF there were no such scam reports, and all the other results appeared different from on IE.

The above were without enclosing the search phrase in quotes. If I do use quotes, MF gives;

"Your search for “mrs. jessica cora” did not match with any Web results. "

This is pretty typical of what I see.

while Google gives pretty much, but not exactly, the same as without quotes.

11

You’re right. I had presumed they were swapping in pigeons for people when they published their April Fool’s description:

http://www.google.com/technology/pigeonrank.html

12

You say the “Mozilla Firefox default homepage” is giving you bad search results. Are you sure it’s really Firefox’s? Sometimes malware changes a browser’s home page. Just because the page says “Firefox” and “powered by Google” on it, that doesn’t mean it is.

What is the URL shown for the page that produces the bad search results?

13

I suspect that this might be the case. I performed the search “mrs. jessica cora” in Google on IE and got results similar to those reported by UncleFred. I then did some more searches:
[ul]
[li]Google on FF: Same results[/li][li]Google Searchbar on FF: Same results[/li][li]Default FF homepage, powered by Google, logged into Google: Same results[/li][li]Default FF homepage, powered by Google, logged out of Google: Same results[/li][li]Default FF homepage, powered by Google, with private browsing: Same results[/li][li]Default FF homepage, powered by Google, newly installed on new system: Same results[/li][/ul]