Firefox search results? Are they based on a users previous search history
I have been using Firefox for some time now. I am a digital marketing consultant and I was checking the SERPs for my clients rankings. Firefox showed them on Page one of google today. Woohoo I thought. I generated the reports to show my clients their new rankings, only to receive half a dozen phone calls explaining that their search results were different than mine.
So I decided to do the same searches via Chrome, IE and Safari. Low and behold my clients were correct. Their websites were not being shown on page one as Firefox was showing. How could this be. I wasn't signed in to Google when performing my searches so the results couldn't be based on my Google browsing history.
After deleting my history and as much cashed info as I could I repeated the searches using Firefox. They were now different.
How could this happen? Why wasn't I told this could happen? I have been using Firefox for about 8 months so does this mean the results could be wrong for every search I did over the past 8 months? Surely Google should be left to display the most relevant results not Firefox. How detrimental could this be to my business if 8 months of reporting is incorrect? This could damage my reputation for a long time to come.
How do I stop this from happening in the future other than stop using firefox. Or is firefox not the issue here?
Chosen solution
firefox doesn't provide any search results - google does.
and it does it with the help of search history personalization unless you opt out. as it is stated on their site they track you with a cookie when you're using google not logged in with your account. therefore on other browsers the results might differ because each browser stores its own cookie information.
you can also set firefox to only keep google's cookies for a session (until the browser is closed), by rightclicking on the page when you are on google.com > view page info > permissions > set cookies - allow for session
Read this answer in context 👍 0All Replies (4)
this is rather a google issue since they also record your search history when you're not logged into your account - see http://support.google.com/accounts/bi.../answer.py?hl=en&answer=54048 for information on how to opt out of this tracking.
If this is the case why did the other browsers show different results than firefox. I use them all as I test cross browser compatibility issues. I also use different computers.
Are you saying under no circunstances does Firefox provide results based on my search history?
Thanks
Suluhisho teule
firefox doesn't provide any search results - google does.
and it does it with the help of search history personalization unless you opt out. as it is stated on their site they track you with a cookie when you're using google not logged in with your account. therefore on other browsers the results might differ because each browser stores its own cookie information.
you can also set firefox to only keep google's cookies for a session (until the browser is closed), by rightclicking on the page when you are on google.com > view page info > permissions > set cookies - allow for session
Ah ha. I stand corrrected. Thank you for your answer Obe Wan :)
Firefox still rocks after all.
Thanks god for that. I've been using IE this morning to re do the searches and it's soooooooo sloooooow. Why do we still use it again . . .