#Tick tock search how to#
#Tick tock search full#

Its search crawlers don't understand what's on the screen in any meaningful way. Introducing chapter markers made the system better, but only because creators gave Google hints about where to look. Google is reportedly working on deals with ByteDance and Facebook to bring more content with better metadata into Google's search results, but that, too, is only half the battle.Įven on YouTube - itself the world's second-largest search engine, and obviously a Google-owned company - Google's search relies on metadata and automatically generated transcripts to figure out what's going on in a video. It's technically possible to search TikTok and Instagram through Google, but the results are pretty primitive and mostly based on hashtags and video descriptions. Context is crucial to that, too.īut just as important, and just as difficult, is understanding the information on the other side. Google has long talked about wanting to take search beyond the text box, to make it easier for people to input information and get answers. It's all part of Google Lens, the visual-first search system the company has been building for several years.

#Tick tock search how to#

Or a way to take a photo of your broken bike chain and get search results for how to fix it. And for the company that has spent two decades dedicated to organizing the world's information, that presents a problem.Īt Google's Search On event on Wednesday, Google executives showed off some fancy new features, like a camera feature that can take a picture of a shirt and find socks with the same pattern. TikTok and Instagram, podcasts and videos: Those platforms are just as much 'the internet' as the Wikipedias and publisher sites Google has long relied on.

#Tick tock search full#

An increasingly large amount of the web is not web pages full of text and hyperlinks. It's a lot of work, but Google's better at it than most.īut there's a core change happening on the internet that threatens Google in a serious, potentially existential way. Nayak rattled off numbers like the 3,600 changes made to the search system last year, or the 60,000-plus experiments run internally. Understanding what's authoritative vaccine guidance and what's dangerous misinformation, or whether you typed 'spaghetti' looking for definitions or recipes? That's all much more complicated. Crawling web pages is the easy part, relatively speaking. Google's challenge on the web is to find ever-better ways to collect and sort information. But there are two other reasons, he said: The world changes all the time, and people's curiosity 'is quite infinite in its complexity.' 'Part of it, I have to admit, is that people find new and creative ways of misspelling words,' Pandu Nayak, a Google fellow and the company's VP of search, told me earlier this month. And even at Google's impossible scale, the number never seems to go down. One of Google's favorite statistics is that every day, roughly 15% of Google queries are for things that have never before been typed into the search box.