TikTok, Google Search is on the clock

TikTok scrollers everywhere, prepare to be reading a lot more – like it or not. According to a notification sent to users in late September, the short/medium(?)-form video platform is expanding the length of descriptions from 300 characters to 2,200 characters. Musical.ly, oh how you’ve grown up.

📱🔍 Driving the move… A desire to compete with Google in search, something Bytedance hasn’t exactly been shy about. And when it comes to expanding captions, this has two benefits for TikTok — both search-related.

1. More traffic: Google already indexes TikTok videos to show them in search results. Now, they’re even more searchable.
2. TikTok’s own search becomes more robust: While the platform hasn’t explicitly said how it ranks search results, creators and businesses can add additional tags and descriptors to make their content more discoverable.

📸 Big picture: Like Mario on a banana peel, Google’s dominance of search may be slipping. More product searches now start on Amazon (61% vs. 49% for search engines). And per Google senior vice president Prabhakar Raghavan this past July, “In our studies, something like almost 40% of young people, when they’re looking for a place for lunch, they don’t go to Google Maps or Search, they go to TikTok or Instagram.”

But don’t count the Mountain View, CA-based tech giant out just yet. It still owns 84% of the global search market, after all. And its recent move to incentivize YouTube Shorts’ creators with a ~50% rev-share sits directly opposite to TikTok – which has gained a reputation in the industry as not being very creator-friendly.

+Dive deeper: Bytedance launched its own search engine in China at the end of August.