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Comment by tenebrisalietum | Hacker News Reader

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?

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>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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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