Gen Z is not “Google”. They use Instagram, TikTok as search engines

Since then, Google has come a long way from being a reference point in a supernatural teen drama. Google co-founder Larry Page first coined the verb two months before the company was founded, when he told friends about the company in an email and signed off, “Have fun and keep searching on Google!” The term was coined in the Oxford English Dictionary in June 2006, and since then, the neologism has become synonymous with using a search engine. But not anymore. Today’s teenagers rarely use Google as a verb, according to Bernstein Research, and it’s a sign that they’ve fundamentally changed the way they interact with the Internet.

“Younger audiences are ‘searching’, not ‘googleing,'” Bernstein analyst Mark Shmulik and colleagues said in a note published Friday. “And they are increasingly turning to social networks like TikTok for restaurant recommendations, directly to scale aggregators like Amazon for retail, and AI generative search like ChatGPT to do your homework.”

Bernstein, using an April 2024 survey by Forbes Advisor and Talker Research of 2,000 Americans, noted that 45 percent of Gen Z are more likely to use “social search” on sites like TikTok and Instagram instead of Google . That’s compared to about 35 percent of millennials, 20 percent of Gen Xers, and less than 10 percent of boomers. Even though Gen Z is getting older, they have increasingly relied on social media as their primary search engine.

“Gender. Whey also grew in a relatively mature Internet,” Shmulik said in the note. “It’s second nature for these users to go straight to the source… This world isn’t big and scary, it’s just home for Gen Z.”

For the younger generation, social media platforms have become a way to search for what to buy, where to eat and how to spend their time. About 40 percent of Gen Z said they used social media as their primary search engine for brands, products and services in 2016, and nearly 52 percent said the same in 2023, according to GWI Core data.

Social media sites like Instagram and TikTok have responded to Gen Z’s prolific search for things to buy online with their own e-commerce platforms and personalized ads, capturing $11 billion in U.S. ad revenue from minors alone in 2023. Even more water is Gen Z spending power, estimated to grow to $12 trillion by 2023, according to NielsonIQ’s “Spend Z” report. Gen Alpha, the generation of iPad kids, is following in their footsteps, already spending over two hours a week shopping online.

Google is so last decade

But while social media sites have begun to capitalize on Gen Z’s penchant for scrolling and searching, Google has another problem to contend with.

“Something like almost 40 percent of young people, when they’re looking for a place to have lunch, they’re not going to Google Maps or Search,” said Prabhakar Raghavan, Google’s senior vice president, during wealthThe 2022 Brainstorm Tech conference, which references the company’s internal data. “They go to TikTok or Instagram.”

Google’s search engine woes are compounded by its recent antitrust loss in which a federal judge ruled that the tech giant monopolized the search market. Google’s parent company, Alphabet, paid $26 billion to be the default search engine on smartphones and web browsers, effectively preventing competing search engines from succeeding in the market.

As for Gen Z, Google has already made changes, given that young people are drawn to images and videos, which contrasts sharply with older generations’ search habits of searching for key phrases and clicking on a link which best corresponds to those terms.

“The journey begins in different forms than before: visual image forms,” ​​Raghavan said.

Since then, Google has invested in technology to address this, including augmented reality glasses with “multisearch” features that allow users to use both images and text to search online, and includes an “almost by me’ to find local products, shops and services. the users. The company is testing an Ask Photos feature that uses its Gemini AI models to answer questions about information in a user’s photo, such as the restaurant they ate at or the last time they visited a certain location.

“We have to evoke completely new expectations, and that requires completely new … technological foundations,” Raghavan said.

Google did not immediately respond to wealthhis request for comment.

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