Controversial Chinese platform TikTok has taken Google’s spot as the number one most visited domain on the web. Google has maintained the top spot for over a decade now, with its last real competitor for the title of the world’s biggest internet platform being Yahoo at the start of the 2010s.
Google has come a long way. Far from just the search engine it once was, over the span of a decade, Google has gone from a handy tool to a verb we use in our day-to-day life.
Don’t believe me? Google it. However, the platform that has dethroned the tech giant is a lot less utility-based. TikTok branched off from a pre-existing platform called musical.ly that took the world by storm in the mid-2010s, gaining popularity with one simple function, musical overlay over videos that allows you to create your own lip-syncing music videos.
TikTok is a bit different though. When you download the app, it will simply ask you to view random content that you can either continue watching or swipe away from. The reason it does this is that behavior predicting data harvesting algorithms and app design has come a long way since the days of musical.ly.
The type of algorithm used by TikTok is the first of its kind. Its methods of honing in on what content you like to watch are so predictive that it can sometimes come off as a little bit eerie. It is this reason that also helps maintain TikTok’s addictive properties and marks a new age in technological development as well as how people consume information.
TikTok not only poses a threat to tech giants the likes of Google and Facebook (now Meta)... Due to the platform having closer ties to the Chinese government than most would like to admit, even governments like India moved to ban the platform due to it being seen as a security threat.
And yet the platform just keeps on growing, with average TikTok users being led to believe that they are customers, rather than products in the business equation of the platform. Now that TikTok has surpassed Google it is interesting to note that other tech giants will likely have to fight fire with fire and use the same dystopian tactics used by TikTok in a bid to compete with the newly crowned world’s biggest online platform.