Nearly half of Gen Z is using TikTok and Instagram for search instead of Google

@dang - this warrants a title edit at the very least, if not actually a flagging.

(Conclusion from the Twitter thread: The original story was actually "When they are looking for a place for lunch they go to TikTok or Instagram. That's it".)

I just recently did a similar search, “things to do in Austin” on a bored weekend, and my go-to search platform was TikTok. I liked that the content was visual and engaging and has an authentic feel, vs my expectation that the first 100 Google results would be the same Top 10 articles of the most generic tourist traps in the city. In fact, I just did the search now and that’s exactly what I got.

> This seems like a terrible search experience though!

I suspect IG/TikTok users are on average terrible computer users too. It's not like growing up with smartphones teaches you anything about dealing with or evaluating information systems; you're a consumer who is fed things and your success entirely depends on a small elite to feed you correctly.

I have tried TikTok and honestly it's perfect to find cool places to eat at or even when visiting a new city.

>I'll have to try TikTok I guess

do because you will be very surprised at how good it is

> "something like almost 40% 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."

That might mean something like looking to see what restaurants friends have posted about, not necessarily searching.

To some degree but I disagree that is the issue here.

EDIT - however seems the article is mostly bullshit: https://twitter.com/Vortex_Egg/status/1548047888931905540

I'm definitely feeling this too. Finding documentation on some libraries I use has become impossible even with the site: operator. Older articles don't show up anymore. I also have to quotes the hell out of things to get proper results.

Google delivers worse and worse results. I have a hypothesis, that’s my problem searching in 3 different languages depending on topics. But also simple English engineering inquiries I must occasionally repeat on bing or DuckDuckGo.

This seems indeed to be the case; over the last months I compared what I find with google and duckduckgo, and certain facts, which can be found easily on duckduckgo, just don't or only very sparsely appear in google's results.