Google Links To Competitors Next To YouTube Videos

Google has begun showing links to different video sites and search engines in its search results. The links appear next to YouTube videos — but only on music-related searches.

On a search for u2, for example, Google shows three videos from YouTube, but each video listing now includes additional links that might otherwise have only shown up further down the page or on deeper pages. In the example above, the outbound links point to a mix of video-specific sites (Dailymotion, Metacafe) and search engines (Yahoo, Yandex).

In a late Friday blog post, Google explained where the links come from:

The feature scans the entire web for video content and algorithmically ranks the best sources for each song. Rather than return repetitive links, we group results for the same song together, making it easier to scan and choose the song you’re looking for.

The timing of the new display is interesting, to say the least. There’s a growing chorus of complaints around the world that Google favors its own sites, including a formal EU investigation.

This move seems like an obvious response to those complaints but, not surprisingly, Google doesn’t say anything along those lines in its blog post.