TikTok May Integrate Google Search As an In-App Feature

Date: September 26, 2023

Have you seen the 60-second ad of a loving father and daughter decorating their new home? Watch it, and you’ll know how to search on TikTok.

TikTok is famous for the infinite scrolling and endless loops of videos in the mixed portfolio of entertainment, education, information, and sometimes misinformation as well. Currently, TikTok has nearly 1 Billion monthly users, of which about 40% of users use it as a search engine instead of Google. TikTok knows that people are using it as a search engine, and now it is working on integrating Google Search for better results from the web.

TikTok has even made a 60-second ad that ends with the tagline “Search it with TikTok.” The ad depicts a father-daughter duo trying to decorate their new home and looking for tips to do the right thing. While beautifully showing how the duo works together, it ends with a strong message that anything you’re looking for can be found on TikTok. 

From finding the right angle to hang a frame to looking at the top aesthetic design options to place your books on a bookshelf, TikTok is serving its users with an overload of information. Through mostly User Generated Content, TikTok has now become one of the top platforms to search for something after Google. A UK-based survey conducted last year concluded TikTok to be the fastest-growing source of news for adults while already sustaining a strong young user base.

Google and other traditional search engines are getting eclipsed by the social media platforms being treated as search engines. Prabhakar Raghavan, SVP of Google, said, “In our studies, something like almost 40 percent 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." The study he displayed data from was a survey of U.S.-based users aged 18 to 24.

One of the main reasons behind this dynamic shift is that video content is instantly available through scrolling without visiting multiple websites. All of this can be done while easily shifting within the app to entertainment mode to take a break from their research and get back in an instant again. TikTok is observing this trend, and the internal team has revealed that they are working to integrate Google search results into it to minimize misinformation.

The incorporation of Google search results into TikTok's own in-app searches is currently being tested. The third-party integration, which was discovered by app researcher Radu Oncescu and verified by TikTok to Business Insider, would cause Google results to appear while searching on TikTok.

Source

TikTok is currently the biggest source of misinformation as most unreviewed content runs rampant on the app quite quickly before the surveillance teams take it down.