5 ms·

I tried replacing Google with TikTok, and it worked better than I thought

47 points by quyleanh 4y ago

cush 4y ago
A few months ago the headline was "Is Reddit the new Google?" Using Google to find honest and real reviews of products, restaurants, recipes or any other similar SEO-magnet is next to impossible. Google incentivized the world to create their ad-centric cesspool internet and young people are choosing not to participate in it.
- danielvaughn 4y ago
  Classic clickbait. Is X the new Y?
- lofatdairy 4y ago
  Hilariously, Reddit's search is still notoriously unusable despite years and years of complaints. That said, if there's any benefit from Reddit replacing nearly every single forum on the internet, it's that if there exists something worth reviewing, it's probably posted there.
skilled 4y ago
Worth noting that the author of this article did not act on genuine inspiration, but is farming clicks for The Verge. [0] There have also been mentions of this (people using TikTok for search) by several other publishers. Why explicitly state that? Because using TikTok as a search engine is dumb. It is probably quite good to use for searching clips such as (as the author implied in the article) "best NBA plays by Kobe", but it will not go any further than that. [0]: https://www.businessinsider.com/nearly-half-genz-use-tiktok-instagram-over-google-search-2022-7?r=US&IR=T https://www.businessinsider.com/nearly-half-genz-use-tiktok-...
- tenebrisalietum 4y ago
  I just put in "how to hang drywall" in Google and Tiktok. Google's first result which takes up the whole browser window is a video sponsored by Lowe's. Scrolling down are a few YouTube links to videos. Tiktok gives me 4 videos, but one of them is about hanging a picture on drywall. The other three seem like they would help me. Idk I just feel like Google and Facebook have had decades to work on this stuff, even inventing some tech behind it, but Tiktok's only been around a few years and does what they do at least as good. What have Google and Facebook been doing all this time? With all the data Google and Facebook have on everyone why is Tiktok, which I'm using with an email unconnected to anything else of mine and all iPhone privacy settings enabled, far better at showing me what I want?
  - mountainb 4y ago
    Because data is mostly useless trash, and retrieving usable information out of a trash mountain that is getting much larger every minute is a serious challenge. This is one of the big problems with the internet info mining approach.
  - musingsole 4y ago
    > With all the data Google and Facebook have on everyone I think the size of Google or Facebook's data may well be half the problem. Search may not be generalizable. Maybe the algorithms TikTok uses for video suggestion end up in a more fruitful design space for personalized search.
  - bcherny 4y ago
    Technology isn’t everything. Sometimes focusing on a problem and executing really well is what matters. Even Google can get distracted from the core user need it was built around.
  - jjulius 4y ago
    >What have Google and Facebook been doing all this time? Trying their hardest to replace quality results with things that will generate ad revenue while still making the user feel like they're getting the results they wanted. >With all the data Google and Facebook have on everyone why is Tiktok, which I'm using with an email unconnected to anything else of mine and all iPhone privacy settings enabled, far better at showing me what I want? I checked out TikTok for half a second and noticed that it's just damn good at going, "Hey, tenebrisalietum asked to see how to hang drywall, so show them how to hang drywall". Google sorta does that, too, but as you said, they're going, "Hey, tenebrisalietum wants to see how to hang drywall, does one of our advertisers have a video about that that we can show them? Lowe's does? Cool, fuck the quality of it, let's get that money". TikTok knows that people just want to be shown what they ask for without all the extra bullshit. FB and Google started down the path of adding bullshit for money, and they won't go back at this point.
    - sudden_dystopia 4y ago
      Yea but TikTok has all the extra bullshit of spying on you and sending that data back to China. It’s bad enough our own government spies on us, I don’t need an wide open channel to a second.
_dhruva 4y ago
Recommendation from group I trust has more significance than something based on an impersonal collection. If Google+ groups took off and started taking social graph into search results and used it for ranking, that might have been a game changer.
rvz 4y ago
Classic clickbait and shilling from the Verge. At this point, they are a worse version of the Daily Mail; both grifting for ad-clicks.
danrl 4y ago
Thanks for the summaries here. Avoiding even clicking on a link to The Verge increasingly is a thing. It’s a clickbait machine by now…
bilsbie 4y ago
If nothing else here’s something TikTok search results have going for them: I don’t have to pause to allow cookies before I can see the content I don’t have to close a full screen overlay that wants me to subscribe to a newsletter There’s a good chance the content was made by a real person
- rchaud 4y ago
  What's faster, closing a cookie popup or watching a 7-10 second video that may or may not be related to your search query?
  - KaoruAoiShiho 4y ago
    There's just as good of a chance you'll need 7-10 seconds to parse that the google article is also not related to your query after clicking the cookie popup.
    - rchaud 4y ago
      But when I search, I click based on a one-line description on the results page. Can you really tell anything based on the result thumbnails you see on the TT search page? N.B. I last used TT in January, so if they have changed the search UI since then, I wouldn't be aware of it.
  - bilsbie 4y ago
    It takes me 5-10 seconds to get to the meat of a webpage these days.
- whyoh 4y ago
  Searching videos on TikTok greets me with an anti-bot puzzle. And it still doesn't let me see the results unless I log in. It's pretty much unusable for me.
  - bilsbie 4y ago
    I meant the app. Might be bad on the website.
rchaud 4y ago
I can't help but think that this whole "TikTok is a search engine" school of thought comes straight from Google, which is doing its best to convince regulators worldwide that it doesn't have monopoly power in search. Even in this article, the only source of TT's amazing search engine prowess is....a Google exec. How would they even have enough TikTok data to make such an estimation? All activity happens inside the app, so it's not even like Google could ballpark it based off Chrome browser sessions or something.
Overtonwindow 4y ago
"Ultimately, I don’t think Google is actually nervous about TikTok’s growing search prowess. But YouTube probably should be."
psygn89 4y ago
So if it's non-complex, tangible, and visualizable, use TikTok. Else Google.
reset-password 4y ago
Only tangentially related but I've tried using GPT-3 as a replacement/alternative to Google (Search) when looking for information on non-current events. Google is incentivized to show me more pages that have ads on them rather than pages where I might find an answer and stop searching. Every click in Google is one unit of their product that I've manufactured and drop-shipped directly to their customer, so of course that leads to search results being the carrot on the stick that produces more search queries (ad impressions). When Google does show me a page in this year 2022, it was likely written by an AI writer anyway. They've just "added value" to the page by putting in ads and affiliate links. Using GPT-3 feels like a shortcut that gets me past all of that garbage, and straight to the questionably factual text I'm looking for.
- glenneroo 4y ago
  Sounds like maybe a good startup idea brewing here...
throwaway743 4y ago
Wasn't aware that people are easing tik tok as a search engine. Sounds absurd, but also Google's quality has dropped significantly. Personally, I've switched to kagi.com and results have been night and day
diebeforei485 4y ago
Web crawlers index text content (mostly). Naturally as more content on the internet is video/podcast and not text, this is the eventual outcome.
helph67 4y ago
Lots of on-line privacy related information (including search engines) here... https://github.com/pluja/awesome-privacy https://github.com/pluja/awesome-privacy
fariszr 4y ago
I honestly think brave search is genuinely sometimes better than google, it shows actually relevant results and highlights community posts from websites like reddit and others. And with goggles you can filter whatever results you don't like. Although the big caveat is brave still uses Bing for image search, so it sucks. I use SearXNG, so I can have my cake and eat it too, however I can't use UI based features, which is OK so far. (On another note, man that new verge logo, what a waste, that old triangular logo was iconic and immediately recognizable)
vatotemking 4y ago
Google search has stopped working for me for a long time. I usually append "stackexchange", "quora", or "reddit" when searching to get useful answers. If you dont do that, you'll get SEOd garbage.

47 points by quyleanh 4y ago

cush 4y ago

A few months ago the headline was "Is Reddit the new Google?" Using Google to find honest and real reviews of products, restaurants, recipes or any other similar SEO-magnet is next to impossible. Google incentivized the world to create their ad-centric cesspool internet and young people are choosing not to participate in it.

danielvaughn 4y ago
Classic clickbait. Is X the new Y?
lofatdairy 4y ago
Hilariously, Reddit's search is still notoriously unusable despite years and years of complaints. That said, if there's any benefit from Reddit replacing nearly every single forum on the internet, it's that if there exists something worth reviewing, it's probably posted there.

skilled 4y ago

Worth noting that the author of this article did not act on genuine inspiration, but is farming clicks for The Verge. [0] There have also been mentions of this (people using TikTok for search) by several other publishers. Why explicitly state that? Because using TikTok as a search engine is dumb. It is probably quite good to use for searching clips such as (as the author implied in the article) "best NBA plays by Kobe", but it will not go any further than that. [0]: https://www.businessinsider.com/nearly-half-genz-use-tiktok-instagram-over-google-search-2022-7?r=US&IR=T https://www.businessinsider.com/nearly-half-genz-use-tiktok-...

tenebrisalietum 4y ago
I just put in "how to hang drywall" in Google and Tiktok. Google's first result which takes up the whole browser window is a video sponsored by Lowe's. Scrolling down are a few YouTube links to videos. Tiktok gives me 4 videos, but one of them is about hanging a picture on drywall. The other three seem like they would help me. Idk I just feel like Google and Facebook have had decades to work on this stuff, even inventing some tech behind it, but Tiktok's only been around a few years and does what they do at least as good. What have Google and Facebook been doing all this time? With all the data Google and Facebook have on everyone why is Tiktok, which I'm using with an email unconnected to anything else of mine and all iPhone privacy settings enabled, far better at showing me what I want?
- mountainb 4y ago
  Because data is mostly useless trash, and retrieving usable information out of a trash mountain that is getting much larger every minute is a serious challenge. This is one of the big problems with the internet info mining approach.
- musingsole 4y ago
  > With all the data Google and Facebook have on everyone I think the size of Google or Facebook's data may well be half the problem. Search may not be generalizable. Maybe the algorithms TikTok uses for video suggestion end up in a more fruitful design space for personalized search.
- bcherny 4y ago
  Technology isn’t everything. Sometimes focusing on a problem and executing really well is what matters. Even Google can get distracted from the core user need it was built around.
- jjulius 4y ago
  >What have Google and Facebook been doing all this time? Trying their hardest to replace quality results with things that will generate ad revenue while still making the user feel like they're getting the results they wanted. >With all the data Google and Facebook have on everyone why is Tiktok, which I'm using with an email unconnected to anything else of mine and all iPhone privacy settings enabled, far better at showing me what I want? I checked out TikTok for half a second and noticed that it's just damn good at going, "Hey, tenebrisalietum asked to see how to hang drywall, so show them how to hang drywall". Google sorta does that, too, but as you said, they're going, "Hey, tenebrisalietum wants to see how to hang drywall, does one of our advertisers have a video about that that we can show them? Lowe's does? Cool, fuck the quality of it, let's get that money". TikTok knows that people just want to be shown what they ask for without all the extra bullshit. FB and Google started down the path of adding bullshit for money, and they won't go back at this point.
  - sudden_dystopia 4y ago
    Yea but TikTok has all the extra bullshit of spying on you and sending that data back to China. It’s bad enough our own government spies on us, I don’t need an wide open channel to a second.

_dhruva 4y ago

Recommendation from group I trust has more significance than something based on an impersonal collection. If Google+ groups took off and started taking social graph into search results and used it for ranking, that might have been a game changer.

rvz 4y ago

Classic clickbait and shilling from the Verge. At this point, they are a worse version of the Daily Mail; both grifting for ad-clicks.

danrl 4y ago

Thanks for the summaries here. Avoiding even clicking on a link to The Verge increasingly is a thing. It’s a clickbait machine by now…

bilsbie 4y ago

If nothing else here’s something TikTok search results have going for them: I don’t have to pause to allow cookies before I can see the content I don’t have to close a full screen overlay that wants me to subscribe to a newsletter There’s a good chance the content was made by a real person

rchaud 4y ago
What's faster, closing a cookie popup or watching a 7-10 second video that may or may not be related to your search query?
- KaoruAoiShiho 4y ago
  There's just as good of a chance you'll need 7-10 seconds to parse that the google article is also not related to your query after clicking the cookie popup.
  - rchaud 4y ago
    But when I search, I click based on a one-line description on the results page. Can you really tell anything based on the result thumbnails you see on the TT search page? N.B. I last used TT in January, so if they have changed the search UI since then, I wouldn't be aware of it.
- bilsbie 4y ago
  It takes me 5-10 seconds to get to the meat of a webpage these days.
whyoh 4y ago
Searching videos on TikTok greets me with an anti-bot puzzle. And it still doesn't let me see the results unless I log in. It's pretty much unusable for me.
- bilsbie 4y ago
  I meant the app. Might be bad on the website.

rchaud 4y ago

I can't help but think that this whole "TikTok is a search engine" school of thought comes straight from Google, which is doing its best to convince regulators worldwide that it doesn't have monopoly power in search. Even in this article, the only source of TT's amazing search engine prowess is....a Google exec. How would they even have enough TikTok data to make such an estimation? All activity happens inside the app, so it's not even like Google could ballpark it based off Chrome browser sessions or something.

Overtonwindow 4y ago

"Ultimately, I don’t think Google is actually nervous about TikTok’s growing search prowess. But YouTube probably should be."

psygn89 4y ago

So if it's non-complex, tangible, and visualizable, use TikTok. Else Google.

reset-password 4y ago

Only tangentially related but I've tried using GPT-3 as a replacement/alternative to Google (Search) when looking for information on non-current events. Google is incentivized to show me more pages that have ads on them rather than pages where I might find an answer and stop searching. Every click in Google is one unit of their product that I've manufactured and drop-shipped directly to their customer, so of course that leads to search results being the carrot on the stick that produces more search queries (ad impressions). When Google does show me a page in this year 2022, it was likely written by an AI writer anyway. They've just "added value" to the page by putting in ads and affiliate links. Using GPT-3 feels like a shortcut that gets me past all of that garbage, and straight to the questionably factual text I'm looking for.

glenneroo 4y ago
Sounds like maybe a good startup idea brewing here...

throwaway743 4y ago

Wasn't aware that people are easing tik tok as a search engine. Sounds absurd, but also Google's quality has dropped significantly. Personally, I've switched to kagi.com and results have been night and day

diebeforei485 4y ago

Web crawlers index text content (mostly). Naturally as more content on the internet is video/podcast and not text, this is the eventual outcome.

helph67 4y ago

Lots of on-line privacy related information (including search engines) here... https://github.com/pluja/awesome-privacy https://github.com/pluja/awesome-privacy

fariszr 4y ago

I honestly think brave search is genuinely sometimes better than google, it shows actually relevant results and highlights community posts from websites like reddit and others. And with goggles you can filter whatever results you don't like. Although the big caveat is brave still uses Bing for image search, so it sucks. I use SearXNG, so I can have my cake and eat it too, however I can't use UI based features, which is OK so far. (On another note, man that new verge logo, what a waste, that old triangular logo was iconic and immediately recognizable)

vatotemking 4y ago

Google search has stopped working for me for a long time. I usually append "stackexchange", "quora", or "reddit" when searching to get useful answers. If you dont do that, you'll get SEOd garbage.