During an event that took place in September, Google’s senior vice president, Prabhakar Raghavan, revealed a very curious information. According to him, about 40% of the young American audience is giving up Google searches and opting for short video platforms. Of these, the one that stands out the most is TikTok.
It may be difficult for adults to assimilate this key change. After all, Google’s dominance in the internet search business is already more than consolidated. It’s years and years of tweaking the most robust tool available to find what you need. Competitors tried, but either disappeared (remember the Where?), or they cannot deliver a better product (Bing and DuckDuckGo come to mind).
What chance, then, would TikTok – a short video app – have in this endeavor?
The thing is, TikTok doesn’t seem to be trying compete with Google. Its use as a search engine is one of those cases of users unexpectedly appropriating a social network. In the words of Prabhakar Raghavan himself, “(…) new internet users do not have the expectations and mentality that we are used to. The questions they ask are completely different.”
Is TikTok a good search engine?
That’s the first question anyone unaccustomed to the platform would ask. It may sound cliché, but the answer is: It depends.
The trend identified by Google – and confirmed by articles such as it isof New York Times – is that TikTok is used as a search engine in very specific contexts. One of the most mentioned is the search for restaurants. Another one worth mentioning are the cultural tips: book reviews, series, movies.
One of the advantages of TikTok in these contexts would be how quickly results can be checked. There is no need to go to multiple external links and check each site. By clicking on the first video, you can zap through the rest of the results with a simple finger movement. And sometimes the first few seconds are enough to determine if there is the answer you were looking for or not.
Another important point is the social factor. Others people produce the content displayed in searches, people you see and hear. A text found by Google can be extremely useful, but it doesn’t have the same appeal as visual sharing of information. Or rather, experiences.
The example of restaurants shows this very well. It’s one thing to read a review on a newspaper’s website; another is to observe the experience of someone entering, sitting down, looking at the menu and enjoying the dish. Many of the restaurant videos follow this pattern, which makes them repetitive, but they deliver much more interesting content than Google search. At least for a part of the audience.
The same goes for other people making recommendations for movies and series, or even experts explaining aspects of their areas of expertise in a brief and relaxed way. This, added to the ease of short videos, makes TikTok an interesting environment to find information.
But at this point there is a possible problem: the origin of this information.
The inevitable problem of misinformation
Newsguard, a service that monitors the reliability of thousands of websites and news outlets, analyzed TikTok search results. The very serious themes chosen from what you get from restaurants: covid-19, war in Ukraine, US elections, among others. After all, you’re not just looking for restaurants and cultural tips on the platform.
O lifting showed that approximately one in five results for the cited topics contain false or incorrect information. To top it off, the search suggestions presented by TikTok can lead the user into a spiral of untrue content.
Some examples found by Newsguard: when searching for the term climate change (climate change), the suggestion climate change debunked (climate changes unmasked); the search for covid vaccine (covid vaccine) came with suggestions such as covid vaccine truths (leading to conspiracy theories about vaccines) and covid vaccine HIV (videos relating the vaccine to the AIDS virus).
As with any platform where content is produced by users, TikTok is full of false or misleading material. Now, with the young audience starting to use it as a source of information, it is certain that ByteDance, owner of the app, will be even more charged to deal with it.
The situation is somewhat reminiscent of the telegram in the Brazilian context. No more than an adjunct in the 2018 elections, the competing application of Whatsapp had a surprising growth in the country. One result was the need to institute clearer methods of combating disinformation. It is likely that TikTok will live with this concern now that it has emerged as an alternative to Google.
How far does TikTok’s ambition go?
Using TikTok as a search tool helps to understand how the Chinese app has been impacting social media companies. The main example is Instagram, which was simply forced to change its model from photos to videos to keep up with the trend popularized by TikTok.
But the brand’s ambitions go beyond the social media landscape. There are plans for a music streamingwhich would put TikTok to compete with Spotify. Another market where ByteDance plans to enter TikTok is that of games (Users would access them from a specific section in the app).
Slowly, TikTok expands its scope beyond its initial functionality: short videos to distract. It is unlikely that anyone would imagine that one day the Chinese application would be this huge thorn in the side of Western companies more than consolidated in their branches, but apparently this is the world we live in now.
If you want to check out some of the team’s impressions of this using TikTok as a search engine thing, be sure to listen to Technocast 265, where we share our experiences. Spoiler: in some contexts, the app is actually better than Google.
https://tecnoblog.net/especiais/tiktok-vs-google-a-batalha-que-ninguem-esperava/