TikTok: The Search Engine For Experiences
TikTok dominates at authenticity.
While Google and Bing chase the LLM hype train, TikTok rises in power as a search engine.
People who don’t use TikTok may be confused about how an app with dancing girls and cringe memes could possibly be a legitimate search engine. The reality is that TikTok has a diverse range of content covering everything you can imagine.
Unlike the SEO spammed search engines, TikTok features content by real people, doing real things, sharing real thoughts, for no financial gain. The information there is authentic, concise, up-to-date and high quality.
TikTok is a search engine for experiences
To understand where TikTok excels, we have to talk about the four types of searches.
Navigational searches are when you’re trying to get to some specific website. You know exactly where you want to go. For example, you want the website for the nearby restaurant to see the menu.
Informational searches are when you want a factual answer. What’s the distance to the moon? There’s one answer to this, and it’s 238,900 miles.
Exploratory searches are when you don’t know what you’re looking for yet. You want to learn about Quantum Physics but you aren’t sure where to start. Search engines have been historically bad at this, but LLMs will excel at this category.
Experiential searches are about real world experiences. What’s the best Italian restaurant in NYC? What are the best places to hike in Peru? Where should I get my hair cut?
These searches don’t have one factual answer. All the answers are subjective. So the most important thing for experiential searches is authenticity.
TikTok dominates at authenticity.
Authenticity
If you’re searching for a good Italian restaurant, you could rely on Google web results, and read those “Top 5 Best Italian Restaurants In The Universe That You Absolutely Have To Try Before You Die” articles. But who even writes this stuff? Can you trust them? Was it just churned out by an SEO content farm?
You could rely on Google or Yelp reviews, but once again, who even are those people? Did they really go to the restaurant? Were they bribed to give 5 star reviews with free ice cream? Are they bots?
Or, you could go to TikTok.
On TikTok you can visit the restaurant virtually, experience the ambience, see the food in front of you, and get a realistic simulation of going there. This is far more authentic than any text-based result could ever hope to be.
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Search for the best places to hike in Peru on Google, and you’ll get some blog posts with pictures. It’s alright. But search on TikTok and you can *go on the hike*. You can live vicariously through someone experiencing it in real time.
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TikTok simulates reality better than other search engines. But it’s also authentic for another reason. Users describe TikTok as being “like getting answers from a friend”. It’s a return to the authentic old web, where people are sharing things without any profit motive1.
Concise
The constraints of TikTok lead to most videos being less than 30 seconds long.
With this constraint, the creator doesn’t have the time to tell you their life story about how their grandma went to the village shrine and had a vision and saw the scrambled eggs recipe appear in the sky and wrote it down on a stone tablet to be handed down for generations.
They just tell you how to cook the damn eggs.
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People use TikTok search because they don’t have time to waste. They want answers. And they want it now.
Recency
Recency bias may be a bad thing in some cases, but it’s a very good thing when it comes to real world experiences.
You don’t want to know what the best Italian restaurant was 6 months ago. You want to know what the best Italian restaurant is today.
Blog posts aren’t updated that often, and subreddits tend to discourage people posting questions that have previously been answered.
Meanwhile on TikTok, new videos are made every second. There’s always fresh content.
Ranking
To game your way to the top of Google, you need to get a lot of backlinks, target the right keywords, and do a myriad of things that have nothing to do with making high quality content.
To game your way to the top of TikTok, you need a high watch time on your videos. This means you need to make content that people genuinely enjoy watching.
This is a much better ranking algorithm if you want high quality content on top. The addictiveness of TikTok speaks for itself.
Prediction
TikTok’s ability to predict what you want is unparalleled.
The perfect search engine knows you so well that you don’t even need to type a search query to get what you want. And that’s exactly what TikTok has accomplished.
Instead of searching for recipe ideas for dinner tonight, you can just open TikTok when you’re ready to cook. It *just knows* that you want dinner recipes without any need to search explicitly.
TikTok is not good at everything
It’s clear why many people prefer TikTok as their search engine for experiences. But it still falls short of a traditional search engine for most other categories.
It’s useless if you’re trying to find a specific website. It’s useless if you’re trying to dive deep into some topic. It’s useless if you’re looking for a code snippet to copy paste. It’s useless for any knowledge that isn’t surface level.
I don’t foresee TikTok getting any better at the other types of searches. The reason it’s great for experiential searches is the same reason it’s bad for everything else.
The Fragmentation of Search
It’s not that TikTok is going to become the number one search engine in the world. It’s that search is becoming more fragmented across different media formats.
People have many different ways of searching that are equally good. So they just use whatever fits their preferences. And a lot of younger people have a preference for visual learning via short-form videos.
I like reading, so I still use Reddit for most searches. But if it’s a real world experience, I combine Reddit with TikTok for maximum power.
Appendix 1: TikTok videos about TikTok being better than Google
Lots of interesting things in the comments of these videos.
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Appendix 2: TikTok advertising itself as a search engine
Two ads from December 2022 where TikTok promotes itself as a search engine. They very much want the app to be used like this.
This is the same reason that people like appending Reddit to their search queries.
I completely agree, and it is stupefying to think why Google is not leveraging Video, or Youtube more in their overall search. And for that matter, why business continue to fail at it even when they have deep knowledge and the capacity to showcase the experiences. For me, whether it is top of the funnel or middle of the funnel or bottom of the funnel, video is the perfect medium to pull new and old customers.
Again, I'm not sure if you're being ironic with this article. How can you genuinely say that the videos on TikTok are useful? It's full of influencers! Who says the TikTok video about the Salkantay Trek you include in the article (which looked lame even though labelled as "one of the best hikes of my life") was not created/paid by the event operator?