When Ja’Kobi Moore decided to apply to a private high school in her hometown of New Orleans this year, she learned she needed at least one letter of recommendation from her teacher. She had never asked for her help, so she asked for help.
“Teacher recommendation letter,” she types into TikTok’s search bar.
Moore, 15, scrolled through the TikTok app and found two videos. Both were created by a teacher and were easier to understand than Google search results or her YouTube videos, said Moore, who plans to speak with her teacher this month.
TikTok is known for viral dance videos and pop music. But for Gen Z, video apps are increasingly also search engines.
More and more young people are using TikTok’s powerful algorithms, which personalize the videos they see based on how they interact with the content, to find information that’s surprisingly personal to them. This coordination is coupled with the feeling that real people on the app are synthesizing and delivering information, rather than faceless websites.
On TikTok, “you can see how people really feel about where they ate,” says Naira Roberts, 25, who uses the app to find restaurants in her Los Angeles home. Told. In her lengthy restaurant review, she doesn’t capture the vibe like a bite-sized clip.
The rise of TikTok as a discovery tool is part of a broader transformation in digital search. Google is still the world’s leading search engine, but people turn to Amazon to find products, Instagram to catch the latest trends, and Snapchat’s Snap Maps to find local businesses. As the digital world continues to expand, so does the world of ways to find information within it.
Google found TikTok invading their domain. The Silicon Valley company has disputed that the youngster is using his TikTok instead of a search engine, but at least one of his Google executives has publicly criticized the rival video app’s search capabilities. I am speaking to
“According to our research, nearly 40% of young people don’t go to Google Maps or Search when looking for a place to have lunch. They go to TikTok or Instagram. Said At a technical conference in July.
Google has been incorporating images and videos into its search engine in recent years. Since 2019, his TikTok videos are part of the search results. In 2020, Google released a YouTube short sharing sub-minute vertical videos of him and began including that content in search results.
TikTok, which is owned by Chinese internet company ByteDance, declined to comment on its search capabilities and products it may be testing. there are,” he said.
Searching on TikTok is often more interactive than typing a query on Google. Rather than combing through a wall of text, Gen Z crowdsources recommendations from TikTok videos to identify what they’re looking for, then binge-watches to sift through content. We then verify the veracity of the proposal based on the comments posted on the video.
This search mode is rooted in how young people use TikTok not only to find products and businesses, but also to ask questions about how things are done and find explanations of what things mean. It’s less than 60 seconds long, but TikTok returns what we think are more relevant answers.
Alexandria Kinsey, 24, a communications and social media coordinator in Arlington, Virginia, uses TikTok to generate many search queries. She also explores less common questions, such as an interview with actor Andrew Garfield and examining her bizarre conspiracy theory.
TikTok results “don’t look as biased” as Google’s, she said, often asking for a “different opinion” than what Google-optimized ads and websites say. added.
Kinsey also said she liked how quickly TikTok videos provided information. She sometimes fact-checks things she finds on TikTok on Google, but “I rarely see things that require that much thought,” she says.
Francesca Tripodi, professor of information and library science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, said TikTok’s rise as a search engine means more people will come across misinformation and disinformation on the app. The platform has struggled to control misleading content about elections, the war in Ukraine and abortion.
TikTok’s algorithms tend to keep users on the app, making it difficult to rely on additional sources for fact-checking, Tripodi added.
“We’re not actually clicking out of the app,” she said. “This makes it even more difficult to double-check if the information you get is correct.”
TikTok is becoming a place to find information. The app is testing its ability to identify keywords in comments and their links to search results. In Southeast Asia, we’re also testing feeds with local content, so people can find businesses and events near them.
Building out search and location capabilities could help TikTok (already the world’s most downloaded app among ages 18-24, according to Sensor Tower) become more entrenched among younger users. I have.
TikTok “is becoming a one-stop shop for content in a different way than it used to be,” said Lee Rainie, who leads internet and technology research at the Pew Research Center.
Jayla Johnson of Newtown, Pennsylvania, who estimates she spends two hours a day watching TikTok videos on her phone, started using the app as a search engine because it was more convenient than Google and Instagram.
“They know what I want to see,” she said. “It’s not my job to go out of my way to find it.”
Digital marketer Johnson added that she particularly appreciates TikTok when she’s looking for places to go and things to do with her parents. Her parents often page through her Google search results, but all she needs to scroll through is a few short videos.
“God bless you,” she said, thinking. “I could have gotten it in seconds.”