Different Search Results on Firefox & IE

[janaki]

Hi,

Today morning I observed that one of my client site is ranked on #1 on Google in Firefox, when I rechecked the same term in IE it was on page 2, almost at the same time. To my surprise, even the tool that shows different data centers also throws similar results. When I open the tool in Firefox, its ranked 1 on all the data centers, in IE the tool gives results on page 2.

Why is this happening? can anyone throw some light on this.

Thanks
Janaki

[edited by: tedster at 9:25 am (utc) on Nov. 11, 2008]

[kidder]

Just to back you up I've also seen this. My best guess is that it has something to do with your browsing history or you might be logging onto your Google account with one browser and not the other. This can influence results.

[Shaddows]

No, I can clearly see different results from 'clean' IE/FF browsers on the same PC, on the same DC (or at least IP).

But not necessarily a recent thing!

[dstiles]

Do both browsers have the same language settings (eg en-US or en-GB)? Only a suggestion in case they are trying to geo-locate by browser.

I've been getting different results for some time based on which computer out of three I'm using here. Page 1 or 2 could sometimes depend on what you mean by page - I'm reading 50 results per page and some results from these tests sometimes stretch across 10-result boundaries. Both Windows machines are Firefox en-US, the linux one is Firefox en-GB. All three give different results at various times so probably not a valid supposition.