How can Chrome rankings vary wildly from Mozilla and IE8?

[theideapeople]

Our website (www.theideapeople.com) has generally ranked on page 4 on Google search for the phrase "charlotte web design" for the past year...regardless of which browser I used. Oh, and my browser location is always set to Charlotte, NC. I also have the Moz toolbar installed and logged-in. Today, I Googled the same keyword using Chrome and we were on page 1 in 4th position! The other browsers still showed us on page 4, as usual. Has anybody else noticed this wild variance with Chrome? Is Chrome learning that I work at The Idea People?!!

[RyanKent]

You can change the setting in your google preferences if desired.

[seoug_2005]

Try turn off Google Instant Search and adding &pws=0 to the end of your search URL

I understood  the second part, but what is the need to turn off  Google Instant. Is just  adding &pws=0  not enough ?

[dittoeffect]

I have noticed the same thing too. Not only can your browsing history change the results but also if you use google plus and have +1'd a page of your site it will also show up higher in the results.

I find it helps a lot to use a rank checking tool rather than looking at your own SERPs.

Many times I had a broken heart from these confusing results

[theideapeople]

Thank you both for your answers and help!

[calindaniel]

Ryan's answer is the correct one. One thing I'd like to add is that there are also handy plugins available within firefox that allows you to search using depersonalized results.

I believe this one should work.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/tag/depersonalization

[RyanKent]

I have checked your site in FF and Chrome. When I search for "charlotte web design" I see you in position 35 (page 4) on both browsers.

Any time you use a browser information can be collected. Even if you log out of google and clear cache other information can be used to offer search results which may vary from the norm.

Try turn off Google Instant Search and adding &pws=0 to the end of your search URL. You should then see the natural position of your result even in Chrome.