We study a subtle inequity in the distribution of unnormalized differences between imaginary parts of zeros of the Riemann zeta function, which was observed by a number of authors. We establish a precise measure which explains the phenomenon, that the location of each Riemann zero is encoded in the distribution of large Riemann zeros. We also extend these results to zeros of more general $L$-functions. In particular, we show how the rank of an elliptic curve over $\mathbb{Q}$ is encoded in the sequences of zeros of other$L$-functions, not only the one associated to the curve.

In this paper we investigate the zeros of the Estermann zeta function $E(s; k/ \ell , \alpha )= { \mathop{\sum }\nolimits}_{n= 1}^{\infty } {\sigma }_{\alpha } (n) \exp (2\pi ink/ \ell ){n}^{- s} $ as a function of a complex variable $s$, where $k$ and $\ell $ are coprime integers and ${\sigma }_{\alpha } (n)= {\mathop{\sum }\nolimits}_{d\vert n} {d}^{\alpha } $ is the generalized divisor function with a fixed complex number $\alpha $. In particular, we study the question on how the zeros of $E(s; k/ \ell , \alpha )$ depend on the parameters $k/ \ell $ and $\alpha $. It turns out that for some zeros there is a continuous dependency whereas for other zeros there is not.