  How different are search engines? The search engine wars are a favorite topic
of on-line analysts, as two of the biggest companies in the world, Google and
Microsoft, battle for prevalence of the web search space. Differences in search
engine popularity can be explained by their effectiveness or other factors,
such as familiarity with the most popular first engine, peer imitation, or
force of habit. In this work we present a thorough analysis of the affinity of
the two major search engines, Google and Bing, along with DuckDuckGo, which
goes to great lengths to emphasize its privacy-friendly credentials. To do so,
we collected search results using a comprehensive set of 300 unique queries for
two time periods in 2016 and 2019, and developed a new similarity metric that
leverages both the content and the ranking of search responses. We evaluated
the characteristics of the metric against other metrics and approaches that
have been proposed in the literature, and used it to (1) investigate the
similarities of search engine results, (2) the evolution of their affinity over
time, (3) what aspects of the results influence similarity, and (4) how the
metric differs over different kinds of search services. We found that Google
stands apart, but Bing and DuckDuckGo are largely indistinguishable from each
other.
