What do you do when you want to look for a restaurant to eat at or a shop to shop at? If you are over 25, the answers are almost certainly two: either use the search engine of Google or alternatively use Google Maps. Although over the years several competitors have alternated – and in some cases consolidated – (from the old Foursquare to TripAdvisor, Yelp and many others), Google has always managed to update its products and maintain a clear advantage over competitors.
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However, things are changing rapidly among those under the age of 25. According to what was admitted during a conference organized in the United States by Fortune da Prabhakar Raghavanhead of Google’s Knowledge & Information division, young people increasingly use TikTok and Instagram directly, also to carry out searches that usually take place on tools designed for that purpose.
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For example, when looking for a tattoo artist in Milan, girls and boys are increasingly likely to use the most suitable hashtags on Instagram or TikTok: “In our studies, we estimate that about 40% of the youthi, to find a place to have lunch, use your favorite social networks. Over time, we also continue to discover that new internet users have different expectations and a different mindset than we are used to: the questions they ask are completely different, ”Raghavan explained.
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Although the use of a social network to search for a restaurant may be unintuitive even for a millennial, there is a very interesting aspect that has been underlined by Raghavan: the very young of Generation Z have never even seen a paper street map, while products like Google Maps are designed to digitally recreate the experience of using an old map. These are modes that are not very suitable for users who are not looking for a digital world that reproduces the mechanisms of the physical one of the past.
Also for these reasons, Google is radically changing the characteristics of its products. For example, Maps now integrates augmented reality, which helps the user to position himself more naturally with respect to the environment around him (instead of moving in circles to see where the blue dot of Maps) and will soon also be able to independently report where what the user is looking for is (all tools that will be even more useful if and when we wear the long-awaited augmented reality viewers in everyday life).
More generally, according to what Raghavan said, users under 25 are interested in forms of research that are increasingly visual and immersive, which do not require the use of the word sequences we are used to and which do not produce dozens and dozens of results. sites to choose from or dots on a map. It has now been more than 25 years since the internet began to spread throughout the world and it was inevitable that in a quarter of a century even the behavior of users would radically change. It remains to be seen whether an “old” Silicon Valley giant like Google will be able to keep up with systems like TikTok, whose potential is still to be explored.