Highlights:
- YouTuber given preference by Google over competitors in Search results claim a report
- Google executives said to have decided to give YouTube a priority
- YouTube results surpass competition irrespective of views or comments
Media report claims that Google is giving preference to YouTube over competitors such as Facebook and Dailymotion in search results. This latest allegation on the tech giant came in between several probes in its competitive practices. YouTube is already a giant in itself in the video-streaming domain as it made a fortune of $ 15 billion (around Rs. 1.12 lakh crore) in annual advertisement revenue as per the January Report.
However, As Google gives a secret competitive edge to YouTube in search results, Google is making the video-streaming platform even stronger than the competition.
A report from The Wall Street Journal said, “Engineers at Google have made certain changes to give preferences to YouTube over other video sources in search results,”.
The report added, “YouTube’s prioritization on the first page of search results has reportedly been decided by Google executives in recent years as a part of efforts to drive traffic to the video-sharing platform.”
To better know the biased behavior of Google, The Journal conducted tests in March using unique IP addresses and by searching Google for the exact title of 98& recent videos on Dailymotion as well as Facebook which were also been identically put on YouTube.
It was found that Google’s subsidiary outperformed the other 2 companies irrespective of the comments and view count.
Also Read: MGM Resorts Data Breach Bigger Than Expected, Reports Claims Data Of 142 Million Guests Compromised
The findings said, “The YouTube version of the videos available on Facebook was in the first slot of video carousel results 95% of the time, while in case of Dailymotion videos, YouTube results emerged first 82% of the time, the newspaper said. Apart from Facebook and Dailymotion, some Twitch videos were used for the tests, but the gamers-focussed platform is said to have ‘sharply underperformed’ in video carousel search results.
In 2018 Google introduced the video carousels in the desktop version of search results, removing the video thumbnails. The new change was aimed to help enhance the experience for the end-users and also allow the owner of the websites to fetch additional traffic if they follow certain guidelines.
Although there were various websites that followed these guidelines, results from YouTube surpassed the competition majority of the time on search results.
However, a spokesperson from Google said that no such preference is given specifically to YouTube or any other video-streaming platform in Google’s search results. The spokesperson was quoted saying, “Our systems use a number of signals from the web to understand what results in people find most relevant and helpful for a given query,”.
The thing to note here is that this is not the first time the Tech giant has been found giving leverage in the online search world to compete.
The Mountain View, California-headquartered company is, as a matter of fact, already facing a series of antitrust lawsuits for abusing its dominance of online search.
In 2017, the European Commission even imposed EUR 2.4 billion (close to Rs. 20,581 crores) fine for its anti-competitive behavior. Even though the company did protest against the eye-catching fine in February this year, the EU judge disagreed.
