The whole thing about TikTok is that you don't need to search, or really make any decision. Videos are picked for you in an endless feed, called the For You feed (or the For You Page, FYP, as the kids call it). A couple years back, TikTok replaced the explore page (the TikTok version of Twitter/YouTube's trending page) with a friends page, and has moved search to a small icon in the top right corner of the screen.
However, recently TikTok has been working on making the app focus less on short form content. TikTok stopped paying people for videos under a minute, introduced a full screen mode for horizontal videos, and videos can be up to 60 minutes long. But another change has been making searching more prominent. Commonly searched related topics appear under videos as well as in comments. For example, if someone shares a video of their dog itching themselves, the suggested search may be why do dogs itch themselves. YouTube is starting to do this, too.
TikTok search works a little differently than search on, say, YouTube. For example, the current video you're watching is taken into context. So you can search part two of the video i just watched and most of the time be suggested the second part. An annoying thing about TikTok search is that it quickly gets off topic, like YouTube search. After about 8 videos, it will start showing you results for whatever it feels like. And when scrolling through the videos individually, they sometimes show different videos than the results screen.
The Problem
This is where the problem starts. There is no exact time when this started happening, but about a month ago, people started noticing that something was incredibly off about TikTok search. The search engine was incredibly horny, to the point that it was starting to become unusable. Almost any search would lead to suggestive NSFW results, no matter how generic of a topic the search is. Even a search for something as basic as cats would show you inappropriate videos. The following lists my experiences, as well as what I saw. Note that different users may see different videos.
cats- The first 3 videos were completely normal. The fourth video was a cat peeing all over a floor with the caption "Piss and jerk my cock 😌". The fourth video was advertising cat meat. The fifth video had two cats tricked into kissing each other. The sixth video was an AI generated video of a pregnant cat peeing inside a supermarket in a cartoon style. A few more videos down was a video of two cats having sex.bmw- A lot of people are making a big deal out of this one, saying it's the worst term. I think this is just suffering from the# ø·ø ̈ùšù„ø© ... ø£øoù†ùšø© ù„ù„ø£ø·ù ø§ù„ ... ù„ùšø ̈ùšøeffect, which is a term I completely made up just now. There are a bunch of terms that people uploaded like 2 edgy videos to on YouTube, and now all the results are just people trying to make the results seem haunted. Search that term up on YouTube, and you will find a bunch of normal videos with shocking thumbnails. Anyways, the first video was just a normal BMW edit, with a girl shaking butt at the start. Nothing too out of the ordinary, it is car content after all. A few videos down, I found a girl exercising wearing a small amount of clothing. The video under that was boobs jiggling, with a bra on. After that, I saw a video that made you think it was going to be a raping, but it wasn't. Most of the other results were just more of the same, suggestive videos with actual BMW videos mixed in. However, I can confirm that yesterday I saw 2 pornographic sex videos, and 1 nude video, however they were from spam accounts (M Y P U S S Y I N B I O). Both videos have been reposted and taken down. A common suggested search for all these videos isbmw backshots, which those videos shouldn't be on TikTok in the first place, but what are you expecting when you search that?glass cleaner- This is another popular search that seems to be getting a lot of bad results. The first video was a spam video, which had an AI generated parrot while a boob bouncing video was overlaid with opacity. A lot of the videos for this search are people talking about these searches in general. I did see an elephant with a large dingaling though.places to travel- A lot of these previous searches have been for broad subjects. When was the last time you searched for glass cleaner on social media? So I wanted to try something that I feel someone would actually search. And this was actually completely normal. The videos weren't good at helping find a place to go. There was one that said that Idaho was an unreal place, which isn't true. Idaho is real, and there is nothing there i think.
The main issue isn't even the searching, but if these videos can come up in a search, they could just be the next video on any bodies for you feed. And it's ironic that TikTok, the platform that has moderation so strict people started saying "unalive" instead of die, is letting this happen is kind of ironic. But I doubt this is going to be changing anytime soon. More engagement has been created because of this. So unless any serious bad press is released, this might just be what we have to put up with.