When Ja’Kobi Moore decided to apply to a private high school in her hometown of New Orleans this year, she was told she needed at least one letter of recommendation from a teacher. She had never asked for one, so she sought help.
“Teacher recommendation letter,” she typed into TikTok’s search bar.
Moore, 15, scrolled through the TikTok app until she found two videos: one explaining how to ask a teacher for a letter of recommendation and the other showing a template for doing so. Both were created by teachers and are easier to understand than a Google search result or a YouTube video, said Moore, who plans to speak to her teachers this month.
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TikTok is known for its viral dance videos and pop music. But for Generation Z, the video app is increasingly also a search engine.
More and more young people are taking advantage of TikTok’s powerful algorithm, which personalizes the videos they see based on their interactions with content, to find information that’s eerily tailored to their tastes. This customization comes with the feeling that real people are synthesizing and providing information in the app, rather than faceless websites.
On TikTok, “you can see how the person actually felt about where they ate,” said Nailah Roberts, 25, who uses the app to search for restaurants in Los Angeles, where she lives. A lengthy written review of a restaurant can’t capture its ambiance, food and drink like a bite-sized clip, she said.
The rise of TikTok as a discovery tool is part of a broader transformation of digital search. While Google remains the world’s dominant search engine, people are turning to Amazon to search for products, Instagram to keep up with trends, and Snapchat’s Snap Maps to find local businesses. As the digital world continues to grow, the universe of ways to find information within it is expanding.
Google has noticed that TikTok is invading its domain. While the Silicon Valley company denied that young people are using TikTok as a replacement for its search engine, at least one Google executive has spoken out publicly about the competing video app’s search capabilities.
The story goes on
“In our studies, around 40% of young people don’t go to Google Maps or Google Search when looking for a place to have lunch. They go to TikTok or Instagram,” Google senior vice president Prabhakar Raghavan said at a technology conference in July.
Google has included images and videos in its search engine in recent years. Since 2019, some of his search results have included TikTok videos. In 2020, Google released YouTube Shorts, which shares vertical videos less than a minute long, and started including its content in search results.
TikTok, which is owned by Chinese internet company ByteDance, declined to comment on its search function and products it may be testing. It said it was “always thinking of new ways to add value to the community and enrich the TikTok experience.”
A search on TikTok is often more interactive than typing a search query on Google. Instead of just slogging through walls of text, Gen Z people collect recommendations from TikTok videos to find what they’re looking for and watch video after video to sort out the content. Then they verify the accuracy of a suggestion based on comments posted in response to the videos.
This type of search is rooted in how young people use TikTok not only to search for products and companies, but also to ask questions about how to do things and to find explanations about the meaning of things. With videos often under 60 seconds long, TikTok seems to be returning more relevant responses, many said.
Alexandria Kinsey, 24, communications and social media coordinator in Arlington, Virginia, uses TikTok for many searches: recipes to cook, movies to watch, and nearby happy hour to try. She also turns to it for less typical questions, like looking up interviews with actor Andrew Garfield and weird conspiracy theories.
TikTok’s results “don’t seem as biased” as Google’s, she said, adding that she often wants “a different opinion” than what Google-optimized ads and sites say.
Kinsey said she also loved how quickly TikTok videos presented information. Though she sometimes Googles what she finds on TikTok, she said, “I rarely see anything that requires so much thought.”
The rise of TikTok as a search engine could mean more people encounter misinformation and disinformation on the app, which could then be amplified and shared more widely, said Francesca Tripodi, professor of information and library science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The platform has struggled with moderating misleading content about elections, the war in Ukraine and abortion.
TikTok’s algorithm tends to keep people in the app, making it difficult for them to turn to additional sources to verify searches, Tripodi added.
“You don’t actually click anything that would take you out of the app,” she said. “That makes it even more difficult to double-check the accuracy of the information received.”
TikTok has evolved into a place to find information. The app is testing a feature that identifies keywords in comments and links to search results for them. In Southeast Asia, it’s also testing a local content feed so people can find businesses and events near them.
The development of search and location functions should further anchor TikTok – according to Sensor Tower already the world’s most downloaded app for the age group 18 to 24 – among young users.
TikTok “is becoming a hub for content in a way it wasn’t in its earlier days,” said Lee Rainie, who leads internet and technology research at Pew Research Center.
That’s certainly true of Jayla Johnson, 22. The Newtown, Pennsylvania resident estimates that she watches 10 hours of TikTok videos a day and said she’s started using the app as a search engine because it’s more convenient than Google and Instagram .
“You know what I want to see,” she said. “It’s less work for me to really try to search.”
Johnson, a digital marketer, added that she especially appreciated TikTok when she and her parents were looking for places to visit and things to do. Her parents often wade through pages of Google search results, she said, while she only has to scroll through a few short videos.
“God bless,” she said, she thinks. “You could have had that in seconds.”
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