Based in China ByteDanceHaving your own TikTok has taken the social media world by storm and established itself as one serious contender to people like Meta Platforms, Inc. META and Snap, Inc SNAP Snapchat.
TikTok, popular for its entertainment-focused short videos, is now increasingly presenting a new use case, according to the New York Times.
According to reports, Gen-Z is now also using the video app as a search engine.
TikTok’s “powerful algorithm” designed to personalize videos shown to a user based on his/her interactions with content and the sense that real people are synthesizing and delivering information, rather than faceless websites, helped to give the platform credibility as a search engine, the report said.
When looking for information about a restaurant in an area, youngsters would rather take advice from a real person talking about it than rely on lengthy written reviews, the Times said, citing a TikTok user.
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The emergence of the Chinese app as a search tool is consistent with the broader shift in digital search, the report said. People are using now Amazon, Inc. AMZN to search for products and Snapchat’s Snap Maps to find local businesses, it noted.
Alphabet, Inc Google WELL Google, currently the leader in search, has noticed that the competition is gaining ground. A Google executive reportedly said at a tech conference in July that the company’s studies have unearthed the fact that about 40% of young people are more likely to use TikTok or Meta’s Instagram to find a restaurant than to rely on Google.
