ISLAMABAD - Google Search has been promoting videos hosted by its own platform, YouTube, even when competitors’ versions are more popular according to an investigation. An investigation that used autonomous bots to search for content found YouTube systemically promotes its own videos over those hosted by competitors like Facebook. In its tests, YouTube’s videos were ‘significantly more prominent’ than those hosted by other platform in the ‘vast majority of cases.’

Searches for 28 videos hosted by the food blog, Tasty, which appeared on both Facebook and YouTube pulled u the YouTube version came up first all but one time- YouTube also occupied 61 percent of the slots in Google’s video carousel. The report says that one nearly six-minute video about caramel desserts on Facebook which had 5.4 million views - 89 times the number of views of the YouTube version - still showed up first in Google’s search results. That trend persisted even when videos on other platforms were technically more popular. The test was also corroborated by sources within Google.