We have a question from Landlubber in Colorado.
We've had a few from Landlubber, but, you know, these are kind of interesting, so I enjoy answering them.
The question is, do your SERPs search engine result pages return the exact same results on all browsers.
That is the same results on Ie, six, Ie, seven, Firefox, two, three Opera, Chrome, and so on.
The answer is usually they do, but not in all situations.
So let me give you a couple of situations where it could differ.
Personalization is based on who we think you are.
So if you're logged in versus not logged in, that might make a difference.
Maybe you're logged in on one browser and you're not logged in on the other.
Another thing that might make a difference is sometimes different browsers support different functionality.
So even though the search results didn't change last year, we were using Ajax to sort of return very fast search results on Firefox, and Internet Explorer didn't really have the support for that that we would like.
So Internet Explorer eventually got that support.
But for a while, if you searched on Firefox, you'd get the results and sort of this fast Ajax form, whereas Internet
Explorer would do the conventional sort of way that we would return search results that typically wouldn't vary the search results.
But in theory, it's possible.
The last thing would be if you might be in what we call bucket testing.
Now that sounds really unflattering.
Where's my bucket?
What's this bucket doing on my head?
So think of it like cookie testing.
Different browsers, depending on when you visit Google might get different cookies, especially if you didn't log in.
And Google is always running small amounts of tests on or relatively small.
It can be a large absolute number amounts of tests on users as they're using Google.
So, for example, we just rolled out a new way of presenting our search results pages.
Whenever you are using Google, you might have gotten into this cookie test or bucket test to see those new search results.
So depending on which browser you're hitting, whether you're logged in or not, which cookies you have all that sort of stuff.
You might get slightly different testing done on the search results, and that could include different algorithms.
So while the vast majority of the time when you're doing a search on Firefox, Internet Explorer or my personal favorite, which is Chrome, you'll get the same search results.
It is possible to have different search results between different
browsers.
Bye.