Bing Bias; Chrome Conspiracy? Browser - Search Engine Co-morbidity

[MatthewHamilton]

Is there the inkling of thought given to the prospect of bias within the mechanism between search relevance /quality between the utilization of a browser that is not aligned with the search engine being deployed? Say a IE user utilizes Google - and again this is perhaps a concern going forward more than it is at present - or a Chrome user searching via Bing - that the inferior compatibility may hinder or otherwise unduly influence search results from an end-user and/or SEO's perspective?

[tedster]

Well, the browser affects the display of the results, and the actual calculation is not done by the browser but at Google's server farm (or Bing's).

[dusky]

MatthewHamilton may mean G* could serve different results if the referrer is IE browser and Bing may serve different as well if the referrer browser is Chrome. They can do that if they want, but that only says to the user, the search quality is not good if they happen to use the "wrong browser", they are not going to put it down to the deliberate practice, hence "inferiorate" their image and push users to other SEs, not other browsers I think. It's common now to see search strings including the referrer browser amongst other strings, so it's easily done.

I don't think that's happening at all. People can see different results on different browsers due to them logged-in or out of their G* accounts, cached pages, different resolution and browser screen display for each browser, rapid SERP changes from one second to the other all make us see different results. I search for something on FF, get the results 1-10 and say 1,500,000 results, when I refresh I get totally different results with different count. If I closed FF and fired up IE, I'll be saying I am served different results. That is to do with the current Go*gle dance in particular.

[Demaestro]

There have been documented cases of people showing bias on Bing when the results have a negative outlook on Microsoft.

I haven't seen anything suggesting the browser referrer affects things but bias does exist without a doubt.