Instead of just slogging through walls of text, Gen Z-ers crowdsource recommendations from TikTok videos to pinpoint what they are looking for, watching video after video to cull the content. Companies must not only have the right voice within the search but also think and act like the consumers they are trying to reach. Instead, I discovered a whole segment of people treating TikTok as a search provider, with some even preferring it over Google. They go to TikTok or Instagram, Prabhakar Raghavan, a Google senior vice president, said at a technology conference in July.
Where is the search engine on TikTok?
One thing I’ve searched for a lot is “back stretches because I have back problems and sit in front of a computer all day. Her parents often wade through pages of Google search results, she said, while she needs to scroll through only a few short videos. YouTube has long been the internet’s second most popular search engine, and for a lot of things, a video is actually the best possible answer. According to a Pew Research Center study, nearly 40% of Generation Z prefer researching topics on TikTok over platforms such as Google.
This mode of searching is rooted in how young people are using TikTok not only to look for products and businesses, but also to ask questions about how to do things and find explanations for what things mean.
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