I’ve been using TikTok for search lately and it kind of works. Web is at a point where it’s faster to watch a video than open a search result. Click a cookie warning, figure out how to disable my ad blocker, and hope I’m not on an SEO page.
I think this is the next move for TikTok - a search + map offering. I've started searching for restaurant reviews on TikTok and it mostly works. Couple things I liked about that experience:
* The medium of video. It's just a next level experience compared to reading text and looking at photos of dishes.
* I thought I wanted an aggregate vote on a restaurant. I actually like one detailed TikTok review over a ton of shallow, generally extreme Yelp reviews.
The current state of text-based Web is unusable. It's mostly SEO text walls with fill up content for SEO. Most of the content is in Youtube videos, which also have it's own filler blabber but at least you find answers.
It's terrible how the "strategic decisions" of one company (Google/Youtube) have marked the flow/form of information in the web. Even "for pay" content providers (mostly news sites) now shove video when you enter into their websites.
Long lost and forgotten are information dense text sites like HowTOs, Benchmarks, Shoot outs and similar web pages from the 90s and early 2000s.
>Even "for pay" content providers (mostly news sites) now shove video when you enter into their websites.
My understanding was that this was mostly a response to a decision by Facebook to boost their algorithmic ranking of articles that feature video. So maybe "two companies" :)
