The top 10 search results shown by Google and Bing for the same queries differ by as much as 75 per cent, according to an analysis of search engines in the US and Germany.
and colleagues at HAW Hamburg in Germany compared the top results from four major search engines – Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo and Metager – to see what sources they pulled from, and how much their results overlapped.
The researchers put 3537 queries that were popular on Google Trends in Germany and the US between November 2021 and March 2022 into the four search engines. They collated the top 10 results for each query in April 2022 and compared the results from different search engines.
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The amount of overlapping results varied from 24 to 25 per cent between Google and any other search engine when looking at US results, and from 27 to 28 per cent for German results. However, the amount of overlap between the other three search engines was higher – between 62 and 70 per cent across German and US results.
Yagci believes that is largely because DuckDuckGo and Metager both use Bing’s search index in part to build their results.
“Generally, search engines offer a variety of sources in the top 10 results,” says Yagci. “However, as our results show, there is a tendency to show the same kind of websites – news and Wikipedia, especially – in the top positions.” Wikipedia was the most cited result on every search engine in both countries.
In Germany, search results tended to show more links to news websites, while social media websites appeared more frequently in US results. YouTube turned up frequently in the top 10 results for search queries on every search engine except Google, which Yagci believes may be because Google, which owns YouTube, has previously faced censure for promoting its own products in search results.
“Another interesting find, especially in the US results, is that Fox News, a right-leaning news source, was absent from Google results,” says Yagci.
Google presented the broadest variety of websites in its results, with 2841 unique domains, compared with 2783 for Bing, 2707 for DuckDuckGo and 2683 for Metager.
“Using more than one search engine is likely to bring additional or alternative results, which is probably useful,” says at Teesside University in the UK. “It is useful to have evidence that search results can differ with different search engines. Further research would be needed into the relevance of the results though – are they just different or are they better?”
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