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TikTok might be famous for both entertaining and controversial reasons. It’s also banned in several countries, which once contributed to solid revenue for the China-owned social media platform. Despite geopolitical challenges, it remains the fastest-growing social media app in the US. So, with more people using and posting there, the platform becomes a rich source of information. And now, Google Search is now extracting info from TikTok videos to enhance its search results.
Google search results now rely on information from TikTok videos
First reported by SearchEngineLand, Google Search is putting TikTok info in more noticeable spots in search results. Before, TikTok videos were there, but not in important spots. Now, TikTok videos and details are showing up in special sections on Google, like Featured Snippets and the Search Generative Experience (SGE). For those unaware, SGE is an artificial intelligence-powered search by Google.
On the same note, Google’s competitor Bing which has gone through some major improvements recently also promoted TikTok video results. It may be dependent on regions as some regions such as India have banned TikTok completely since June 2020.
The report mentions that even they are not sure if this is due to a recent update or has been there before. However, we also believe it could be Google Search’s latest addition. Generally, Google doesn’t announce these tiny updates. I also noticed something similar in Google News when it began mentioning the author’s name beneath an article. This was around September last year.
There are a couple of reasons why Google did this
There might be a few reasons for Google’s decision, and one of them could be a study by Adobe Express, which found that more than 2 in 5 Americans use TikTok as a search engine. Another survey found that over 51% of Gen Z women prefer TikTok over Google for searching. So, Google might be trying to take advantage of this trend. However, whether TikTok is a reliable search engine is still a topic of debate.