Mac vs. PC by Google

If you’re a regular reader of EXCELER8ion you know that Shannon and I like to engage in our own version of the Mac vs. PC debate.

What you may not have known is that Google is an active participant in the game!

While researching a new Bill Gross brain cramp (kidding, it’s a new search engine called snap) over on SearchEngineWatch.com a blog headline caught my eye “Google search results differ on Mac versus PC?“.

Fascinated by the post I put my Mac and PC next to each other in our test center (kitchen counter) for an official EXCELER8ion benchmark test (two computers on our kitchen counter surrounded by myriad coffee cups, Diet Sunkist’s and Sponge Bob gummy bears). I’ve always wanted to have a benchmark test! I opened up a new Firefox browser window on both machines and typed in a key word search near and dear to all our hearts:

“recruiting”

What did I find? Well, apparently users of Mac’s are more enlightened when it comes to recruiting. My logic? Recruiting.com was the fourth listing in the natural search results on my Mac while on my PC it came in at number 5. Proving that while the differences between Mac and PC can be more subtle these days, Mac’s are in fact still superior.

I will add the caveat that when performing the same search this afternoon a number of hours later, that the results for our friends at Recruiting.com came up number four on both platforms. I attribute this NOT to the fact that different servers or time-of-day variables were in play but to the fact that Google’s evil bots were obviously trolling my IM conversation with Shannon on this topic, alerted the Google collateral damage team that a potentially incendiary conversation was beginning to swirl off the Atlantic coast alongside our next tropical storm and hit the ‘Holy Shite Batman Google subterfuge alert button’ sending hundreds of Google engineers scurrying from the free lunch room to change their search algorithms leaving countless partially consumed Odwalla juice containers behind on the tables for the undocumented workers to clean up.

Sure, the difference I documented with Recruiting.com was a small one but what happens when the impact on search results is greater? I wanted to go on to add some smart interactive marketer slant here but the impact of this is rather simple. If you spend some time looking at just how much results can vary on Google for the exact same key word search criteria (here’s an example) it can make a BIG difference in your online search engine recruitment marketing. Great, just what we all need – another variable. Like the differences between popular search engines weren’t enough for us.  And speaking of the differences in search engines…The same key word search for ‘recruiting’ on Yahoo! produced the same organic results on both the Mac and PC.  Recruiting.com was number two in the organic results on Yahoo! proving that Yahoo! is also the superior search engine just as a Mac is superior to the PC. Or, it means that in the search engine war between Google and Yahoo! that Yahoo! is the Mac and Google is the PC. Said another way, Yahoo! works better but no one uses it and no one cares.