Why would a search in firefox be different thant Internet Explorer?

[venrooy]

I've tested out some searches on some of my keywords, and I've noticed that searches from my firefox browser show completely different ads and even the order of the ads than searches from IE. I've cleared history and cookies from both browsers, but both still show completley different ads. What would cause this? Is this something on my end - or a Google thing?

[Quadrille]

Make sure you are logged out of Google and try again.

It may, of course, just be different data centers; try Google by IP address, to ensure that isn't the issue.

[Marcia]

I've seen radically different results in organic search in both browsers (IE and FF), both with being logged in and not logged in. IMHO they're doing testing for CTR with various filters on and off - possibly to test AW clicks with different levels of organic search quality. The organic results I was getting for a few days were amazingly spammy, like all stops had been removed.

[edited by: Marcia at 4:03 pm (utc) on Nov. 8, 2007]

[BDuns]

Wow, I totally noticed that too...the organic search results were total garbage.

Back to the main question - I mostly use Firefox, and every now and then, I'll come across sites that just don't work well with FF. I think people place a priority on getting things to work smoothly in IE before any other browser, which makes sense since more than 75% of our traffic is using IE...I wonder if it's the same case with google (ha, favoring a microsoft product).

One weird thing that I've noticed adwords do when I'm doing a search using FF - let's say I do a search for "televisions," and my ad for televisions is displayed. Then, I'll do a search for something totally unrelated to the previous search (but still a keyword in our account), like "shoes." Adwords will show our televisions ad again, maybe even twice in a row before it gets the right ad up.

[AdWordsAdvisor]

[...] I've noticed that searches from my firefox browser show completely different ads and even the order of the ads than searches from IE.

As an aside, it's probably worth mentioning that it's also possible to see different ads and/or different ad order on consecutive searches in the same browser - as the competitive tide ebbs and flows.

AWA

[RhinoFish]

And the cookies for each browser are giving G a different search history, which they use to modify results.

Clear all cookies for both browsers and take another look.

[venrooy]

When I did the searches, I cleared the cookies in both browsers, and both showed completely different results. URLs and Ads were completely different all the way down the board. Now I can see maybe a few being different, but the whole page was different. And I don't think that it was the flow of the market place, because when I'd hit refresh, neither one of them changed much, but they were still totally different results from one another.

Now later I went back and both were showing the same. So I'm inclined to believe that Google is experimenting.