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Woo Hoo it's Monday and that means the start of a new week. I know I shouldn't be sounding quite so cheerful on a Monday but we were looking at a very long road trip this week and an even longer one next week but I've managed to rescheduled this week's to sometime in the future so the week is definitely looking good.

Today is also looking good because I've got a couple of interesting meetings scheduled while Steve has a whole bunch of very repetitive web pages to write. I did offer to help him with them but he declined so I get to have some fun while he gets the boring job.

That definitely sounds fair to me.

Different browsers - different results
A week or so ago a little blurb on Twitter about one Matt Cutt's videos really caught my eye. If you haven't seen any of them before just head over to YouTube and do a search for "Matt Cutts" and you'll see a list of all the Google videos that he has done.

They're very interesting for a whole number of reasons. Sometimes they're interesting for the advice he gives ... sometimes they're interesting because of some of the hints he drops ... sometimes they're interesting because of what he doesn't say ... and sometimes they're interesting because of what he confirms.

A few months back Steve was interested in the rankings for a particular term. One of our mainstream clients wanted us to target that term for him and after Steve had done some work that focused on that term Steve wanted to see what the results were.

So he did an unpersonalized search using a Firefox plugin on one of his computers in his office at home and came up with some results pages. Then, while he was down at the office the next day he did a search for the same terms on my computer using Internet Explorer. He knew that I hadn't been doing any searches for that term so he wasn't going to be seeing anything that Google had personalized for me.

To his surprise the search results were so totally different that it was hard to believe that he had used the same search term. A little more experimentation and Steve began to think that Google was showing different results depending on the browser he was using.

Now that theory sounds a little whacky and there had certainly been no chatter about it among any of the other search engine experts that Steve talks to. The other week though Matt Cutts confirmed in one of his videos that Google does sometimes show different results depending on which browser a person is using.

According to the man from Google it doesn't happen all the time but it does happen occasionally.

Updating descriptions
The week before last a completely new site went live for one of our local mainstream clients. We did all our usual linking routines to ensure that Google found the new site on well-trafficked local sites and sat back to see what happened.

After a week Steve did some searches for terms that were important for the client and the site was there on the first page of the results. That was very pleasing but what was not so pleasing was the fact that the description that Google was showing for the site was quite different to the one that should have been in the meta description tag.

A little digging and it soon become obvious that Google had gone to the text on the page to pick up a description because Steve had omitted to include a meta description tag. So a few minutes work and the tag was included and we sat back to see how long it would be before the new description appeared.

This morning Steve checked again and what he found was quite interesting. For one of the important terms for this site Google is still using the old description that it found while for another of the important terms Google is using the meta description tag.

Now that is a little strange and we're going to be monitoring that some more just to see when Google will start showing meta description tag text for both results.

But that wasn't the only thing that was interesting when Steve was looking at the results for that particular client ... the results that Google had produced the week before were quite different to what it produced this morning.

Our client ... and the terms that are important to them ... are quite localized and the first lot of results reflected the localized nature of the terms Steve searched for. This morning things had changed and the localized results had been pushed further down the page by a bunch of results for businesses that aren't local and don't even seem to pretend to be local.

Quirky little things like that in search results can often tell us a lot about the way search engines work and you should take time to watch what is happening to the results for terms that are important for you and your sites.