This is a little strange – I was doing some research on television content migrating onto the Web and ended up running the same query – for ‘arrested development’ on Mozilla and Internet Explorer, and found that the MSNBC site hosting the video content ranked higher in a Google search run on IE than on Mozilla –
Click to see SE wierdness
Why would Google serve different results when someone is running a query on Mozilla compared to IE?
I don’t understand why browser would factor into search results – can someone help me out with this one?
1 Comment on "Google search results influenced by browser"
Helen
August 2, 2007I don’t think so because the site ranked in the same place (4th) for both browsers when I tried it. From my understanding of SEO, different Browsers have no bearing on ranking results. They should all have consistent results. What is different should be the algorithm between engines, which is why different search engines may produce different results for the same query. Do you think that the site may have used browser detection but still, I don’t know if this would even be a factor? I know that we are not talking about keywords as of course it plays a significant factor with search engine but maybe it may be a similar case where someone had a Web site built 10 years ago and has the same keyword as you, then your site will probably not rank as high. I’ve contacted several of my friends who are SEO specialists and they said the same thing.
Anyhow, sorry if my answer is not of use to you, however, I do have a question to ask you. How did your site for “Google Search Results Influence by Browser” get indexed so quickly as you’ve only written this a few days ago. To my understanding ODP, such as Yahoo, usually revisit a site every 14 days, I guess it is different with search engine spiders as to how often they reindex a particular site. Good for you Jiyan! The spiders must think that your content is very relevant to viewers to program itself to revisit your site so often:)