TikTok's New Feature Trial Aims To Improve App Searchability

TikTok is piloting new capabilities to a select few testers (photo: Unsplash)

JAKARTA - TikTok is testing a new feature that allows users to identify keywords in the comments and link them to search results.

Actually, the search tab is enough for users to search for content by typing only the keywords, but it seems that this Chinese company wants to give more.

This news emerged from a Twitter user with the account name @olivia_deng_. She shared a short video showing her being able to unlock keywords containing links in the comments.

tiktok is testing a new feature identifying key words in comments and linking to search results for them pic.twitter.com/7dRQMoV4Pk

— Olivia Deng 🍌🧢 (@olivia_deng_) August 5, 2022

When she clicks on the word, she is then taken to a search tab which will show videos related to that keyword.

It seems that the test of this new capability comes when there is a lot of talk that says that the ByteDance application also acts as a search engine for Gen Z besides Google.

According to a TechCrunch report, Google itself has also admitted that TikTok is cutting its Search product. Senior vice president Prabhakar Raghavan, who runs the Google Knowledge & Information organization, recently noted that younger users often turn to apps like Instagram and TikTok instead of Google Search or Maps for discovery purposes.

TikTok has also proven to be a dominant threat in the social media industry, and appears to be threatening Google Search as well. Now, many apps are rolling out new features similar to TikTok.