Google is reportedly in talks with Facebook and ByteDance to include TikTok and Instagram videos in search results. Both Instagram and TikTok have become massive social platforms over the past few years with millions of users around the world. While Instagram expanded into a social media giant from a relatively small photo-sharing site following its $1 billion acquisition by Facebook in 2012, TikTok has exploded into the world’s preeminent short video platform in spite of controversies over its Chinese ownership and ban threats by the Trump administration.
TikTok’s video format has proven so successful that most social apps were forced to launch similar products to stay relevant among the same demographic. While Instagram Reels has proven to be fairly popular among users, YouTube Shorts has still got a long way to go to catch up with its rivals. With the surging popularity of TikTok, a recent study found that people in the US and the UK are spending more time on TikTok than on YouTube. However, YouTube is still the leader in total time spent and has more users overall.
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Google Search already includes YouTube videos, but TikTok and Instagram clips are conspicuous by their absence. According to a report by The Information, the company is now trying to change that by including results from these two influential apps in its search pages. Towards that end, Google is said to be holding talks with Facebook and ByteDance, the parent companies of Instagram and TikTok, respectively. Google has confirmed the report, saying it is holding “standard discussions” as it looks for new ways to organize information in its search pages. The discussions are said to be in the early stages as of now, and there’s no word on whether the companies will be able to thrash out an agreement going forward.
An Agreement May Not Eventually Happen
For the agreement to go ahead as planned, TikTok and Instagram will have to provide Google with the data that the search engine will need to index and classify the catalogs of both services. According to the report, a positive outcome from the talks will not only enable the two apps to reach a wider audience, but also help Google retain the relevance of its search engine in an era where people are increasingly turning to video-based apps rather than web-search to get their information.
However, there’s apparently a good chance that neither Facebook nor ByteDance will want to share their data with Google, which means the agreements may never come through and their videos may continue to remain absent from Google Search results. If the agreements do happen, it will be interesting to see what future search results on Google will look like with links from Instagram and TikTok jostling for attention, along with YouTube, Vimeo, Dailymotion, and other video-sharing sites.
