With the advent of Web 2.0 users are producing bigger and bigger amounts of diverse data, which are stored in a large variety of systems. Since the users’ data spaces are scattered among those independent systems, data sharing becomes a challenging problem. Distributed search and recommendation provides a general solution for data sharing and among its various alternatives, gossip-based approaches are particularly interesting as they provide scalability, dynamicity, autonomy and decentralized control. Generally, in these approaches each participant maintains a cluster of “relevant” users, which are later employed in query processing. However, as we show in the paper, only considering relevance in the construction of the cluster introduces a significant amount of redundancy among users, which in turn leads to reduced recall. Indeed, when a query is submitted, due to the high similarity among the users in a cluster, the probability of retrieving the same set of relevant items increases, thus limiting the amount of distinct results that can be obtained. In this paper, we propose a gossip-based search and recommendation approach that is based on diversity-based clustering scores. We present the resultant new gossip-based clustering algorithms and validate them through experimental evaluation over four real datasets, based on MovieLens-small, MovieLens, LastFM and Delicious. Compared with state of the art solutions, we show that taking into account diversity-based clustering score enables to obtain major gains in terms of recall while reducing the number of users involved during query processing.