Different results in Firefox and Internet Explorer

[sevnrock]

I know quite a few people on this board have posted about this before, but I still don't know the real reason why this is happening.

I'm logged out of Google in both Firefox and Internet Explorer. My cookies and history are cleared. Google Toolbar is uninstalled in Firefox. But for some reason I get bad rankings in Firefox and great rankings in IE.

I checked my index using the "site:*" query and found that in Firefox only 37 pages are indexed, while in IE 150 pages are indexed! A colleague working in the same office has 141 indexed.

Does anyone have any idea what could be causing this?

[doughayman]

I've never seen this across browsers, but I've seen different site: results from IE, on different machines on my home-based wireless network. They are on different internal IP's, but are on the same broadband IP. All weird stuff, and leads one to believe that it is related to specific computer environment (cookies, IE history, Toolbar info stored, temp files, etc.). Based on local environment, apparently we're going out to different Google servers, which often are not in synch.

[tedster]

Welcome to the forums, sevnrock.

My understanding is that detecting the browser is one way that Google splits their total traffic to test different approaches. I've been seeing it happen for years, but not all the time or at least not always very noticeable.

[AnkitMaheshwari]

From my end generally the rankings are the same for both IE as well as Firefox however, I have noticed that most of the times Google shows Local (maps) results in Firefox but not in IE.
I have tried this at different times of the day with same issue/bug/testing/whatever...