"Did you mean" not on all browsers

'Did you mean <this>, <that> or something else'

[laug]

Hi,

Try this: search for the word 'tokyo'.
On my main browser (Firefox), after the sponsered link and the news links, I get this:
Did you mean: <tokyo daigaku>, <university of tokyo>, <tokyo stock exchange>, or <something else>
In the links, there is &suggest=0 or 1 or 2 or 'other'
However on IE6, this line doesn't appear, why is that?

Another thing: the ie and oe (input and output encodings) seem to be missing on the 'Did you mean' links, so in this case the first link, tokyo daigaku, which is spellt in kanji and encoded in UTF-8 before being urlencoded (/search?q=%E6%9D%B1%E4%BA%AC%E5%A4%A7%E5%AD%A6&suggest=0), is then parsed as Latin1 by Google so the results page is garbage.

Thanks.

[ThomasB]

the second thing shows that not even Google is perfect. :)

They're testing lot of things (layouts, functionality) based on cookies. That's probably why you see the differences between the browsers.

[laug]

But what is it that's in my cookie that makes it use this feature? What information is this based on?

[ThomasB]

I don't know, but you could try to compare both cookies. Maybe you see sth that helps.

[GoogleGuy]

Hi laug, we're always trying experiments for new features. Testing new features with a very small random sample of users is a good way to try out new ideas, see how users react, and get an idea of whether it's useful. Sounds like you're in one of those experiments. Thanks for mention the ie/oe aspect; I'll pass that on to the person doing this particular test.

[pmkpmk]

The feature actually sounds pretty useful. How about a "broader" experiment?

[g1smd]

Keep an eye on GoogleLabs.

It goes there for Beta when it is almost ready for the bigtime.