Summersault Weblog

At work I happily run Mac OS X 10.2.8 and my main browser of choice is still Safari (version 1.0.3); it doesn’t really bother me that these are both a couple of years out-of-date since they remain in fine working condition. Sometimes, though, my crusty software does make me feel a little bit like a stick in the mud, what with Tiger coming out and Firefox catching on. But just the other day I discovered that, apparently, Google likes my software configuration quite a bit.

On Thursday afternoon, after performing a standard search using Google, I noticed something strange and unexpected on the results screen: the keywords that I’d entered were bolded in different colors. This is similar in effect to Google’s cache feature (which, by the way, I find indispensable) in that it allows the user to easily scan the page for the words they care about. But make no mistake, this is different and, as far as I can tell, quite new. I am a frequent Google user, but this was the first time I’d ever seen the colored search terms on the results screen; in fact, I’d run other searches with Google earlier in the day without noticing any changes.

Figuring that this was some new feature that Google had just rolled out, I ran a search using a different browser: Firefox (version 0.9.1). Perhaps even more surprising than having the colored terms show up with Safari in the first place was that they didn’t show up in Firefox. Instead, the search terms were bolded with plain, boring black. Bewildered, I tested various other Google searches with the other browsers on my machine–Camino (version 0.8.4), Netscape (version 7.1), Opera (version 6.03), and Internet Explorer (version 5.2.2)–and they all came back with the old black-bolded search terms. I asked my coworkers to check on this, and in an experiment that covered a laudably diverse set of software including Konqueror (version 3.3.1) on MandrakeLinux 10.1, Safari (version 2.0) and Firefox (version 1.0.3) on OS X 10.4.1, and Netscape (version 7.01) and Internet Explorer (version 6.0.28) on Windows 98, the results were unanimous: no colored search terms. Assuming that I’d been hallucinating, I returned to Safari and found that every search I tried (even quoted phrase searches) still resulted in having the colored search terms.

As one final guard against insanity, I compared the source code between two Google search results pages–one in Safari and the other in Firefox–which, except for the colored search terms, looked identical. I ran a diff and, lo and behold, the pages were different! Most noticeably, the Safari page had some stylesheet definitions that were not included in the Firefox page. There were also plenty of indications, both in hidden fields and in querystrings, that Google made a special point of noting that my client was safari. Why this phenomenon works for my Safari (and not, for example, Safari on Tiger) I have no idea. But that’s okay. For now at least, I’m willing to note it simply as one of life’s many mysteries–and perhaps as a sly wink from Google to folks who like their software a little dated.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 27th, 2005 at 1:34 pm and is filed under Desktop Software, Website Design, Internet / Networking. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.