Overlap Between Google and Bing Web Search Results!: Twitter to the Rescue?

Access to diverse perspectives nurtures an informed citizenry. Google and Bing have emerged as the duopoly that largely arbitrates which English language documents are seen by web searchers. We present our empirical study over the search results produced by Google and Bing that shows a large overlap. Thus, citizens may not gain different perspectives by simultaneously probing them for the same query. Fortunately, our study also shows that by mining Twitter data one can obtain search results that are quite distinct from those produced by Google and Bing. Additionally, the users found those results to be quite informative.