Possibly related to  bug 690467 . Can you try changing "use-ddljson-api" to "Disabled" in chrome://flags and see if that makes a difference?

That said, linking to youtube isn't necessarily wrong - if this is a video doodle, then that's probably the correct behavior. Adding some doodle folks to confirm.

Also, what country are you in? (So we can identify which exact doodle this was.)

With use-ddlj-api set to Disabled, Tapping on doodle redirects to google search results page.
I am USA.

I'd expect jumping to YouTube to be the correct behavior too.  I'll investigate why it's going to the SRP.

After digging through email and code, I don't see any clear indication that we've supported jumping to YouTube on a video doodle click.  So I think at this point it becomes a product question -- do we want to change this behavior in Chrome?  From the Doodle side, I think we would, but I will defer to the Chrome team to make the call.

Funny, I would have considered this a product question on the Doodle side :)
AFAIK, Chrome doesn't really care about what exactly the target_url links to. I guess we'd want some indication for the user that it'll be a video, which does seem to be the case here.
Really, the only weird thing is that /newtab_mobile and /ddljson behave differently here.

Anyway. For helping decide what behavior we want: How does this Doodle behave on other surfaces (desktop NTP, GSA, desktop/mobile homepage)? We should probably try to be as consistent as possible.

The behavior on mobile (GSAs & web) is to jump to YouTube and the behavior on desktop (NTP and web) is to show the video inline.  To be consistent, I'd say mobile Chrome should jump to YouTube on tap.

Thanks Tom!
I agree, linking to YouTube makes the most sense to me too. +mardini to confirm.

+ Bling TLs as FYI:

I think this is working as intended for the reasons mentioned in #6. 

Thanks Mardini! Closing as WAI then, please reopen if anyone disagrees.