Are results based on OS?

My friend gets a different result from his Windows box.

[tstaheli]

So I'm doing a search for a "howto" and in G I get a result that is the "howto' for Mac OS X. Below the OS X result was the "howto" result for rest of the OS's. So I ask my friend who is running XP to do the same search and his result is different.

I don't have a PC, therefore I can't test it from my IP. I know datacenters can send different results, we live in the same town and share the same ISP.

Any ideas?

[jamesa]

Good question. I know that you won't see any mention of downloading the toolbar on G unless you're using IE/Win, but I never thought of looking at the serps. Best thing to do is identify yourself as a different browser and compare the results.

If you're using Safari enable the debug menu (do some searches to find out how). In the debug menu you can select among user agents. (Note: only affects the current window so if you open a new window you have to select the UA again, frustratingly enough.)

In Firefox or Moz, get the Web Developer extension to switch UAs.

Opera has it built in as does OmniWeb I believe.

I'm gonna play with this too. Please post if you see anything.