TikTok disrupting digital discovery

• Published date: 25 September 2022
• Publication title: Herald on Sunday

She had never asked for one, so she sought help

“Teacher letter of recommendation,” she typed into TikTok’s search bar.

Moore, 15, scrolled TikTok’s app until she found two videos: one explaining how to ask teachers for a recommendation letter and the other showing a template for one.

Both had been made by teachers and were easier to understand than a Google search result or YouTube video, said Moore, who is planning to talk to her teachers this month.

TikTok is known for its viral dance videos and pop music. But for Generation Z, the video app is increasingly a search engine, too.

More and more young people are using TikTok’s powerful algorithm — which personalises the videos shown to them based on their interactions with content — to find information uncannily catered to their tastes. That tailoring is coupled with a sense that real people on the app are synthesising and delivering information, rather than faceless websites.

On TikTok, “you see how the person actually felt about where they ate”, says Nailah Roberts, 25, who uses the app to look for restaurants in Los Angeles, where she lives. A long-winded written review of a restaurant can’t capture its ambience, food and drinks like a bite-size clip can, she said.

TikTok’s rise as a discovery tool is part of a broader transformation in digital search. While Google remains the world’s dominant search engine, people are turning to Amazon to search for products, Instagram to stay updated on trends and Snapchat’s Snap Maps to find local businesses. As the digital world continues growing, the universe of ways to find information in it is expanding.

Google has noticed TikTok edging into its domain. While the Silicon Valley company disputed that young people were using TikTok as a replacement for its search engine, at least one Google executive has publicly remarked on the rival video app’s search capabilities.

“In our studies, something like almost 40 per cent of young people, when they’re looking for a place for lunch, they don’t go to Google Maps or Search. They go to TikTok or Instagram,” Prabhakar Raghavan, a Google senior vice-president, said at a technology conference in July.

Google has incorporated images and videos into its search engine in recent years. Since 2019, some of its search results have featured 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...