I tried replacing Google with TikTok, and it worked better than I thought | Hacker News Reader

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

theverge.com

47 pointsquyleanh37 comments

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-...

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?

> 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.

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.

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.

>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.

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.

Oh, totally. Don't take my post as a complete defense of TikTok, I don't use it at all. I just noticed that they're smart enough to go, "Y'all know that just giving the people what they ask to see is gonna make 'em come back, right?". FB and Google used to do that but lost sight of that, and now that someone else came along and started doing it, they're shockedpikachu.jpg.

TikTok will get to the Google and Facebook level of adding in advertisers. There's only so long until they turn on the faucet of billions each quarter. I'm also sure it'll get more and more gamed like SEO is on Google and whatever is people would do on Facebook.

Absolutely, I'd say that's basically guaranteed. Hook 'em, then schtup 'em.

So you only looked at 1 result from Google but 4 from TikTok? Seems like a shallow comparison.

Tiktoks search probably works better because the results are organic, unoptimized for whatever it is the Google optimizes for.

I’ve had the same experience. I’ve been looking into how to hang a tv on my dry wall and the quality on tiktok has been way better then what google or YouTube have been able to produce.

From your description it doesn't seem like TikTok gave you "far better" results. What an I missing?

Fwiw I tried it myself. Went to TikTok.com and a video of a girl eating corn started playing (with sound). Tapped the search button at the bottom, which took me to the "discover" page, and there is no search input to be found.

Tried the desktop site and it only lets me search accounts, not videos.

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.

Classic clickbait. Is X the new Y?

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.

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

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?

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.

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.

It takes me 5-10 seconds to get to the meat of a webpage these days.

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.

I meant the app. Might be bad on the website.

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.

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.

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…

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.

Sounds like maybe a good startup idea brewing here...

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

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)

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

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.

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

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

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

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

Reply on news.ycombinator.com