ByteDance, the parent company of famous video app, TikTok is going to roll out its search engine soon.
Toutiao Search, ByteDance’s search engine will be an extension of a current news aggregator.
The new search engine will pull out results from the web and other ByteDance’s owned properties. Although, as is the case with search engines in China, the results are censored.
When searching for a news topic, for example, users will be able to only see results from China’s state-approved media outlets.
Since Toutiao Search is dedicated to serve China, so it won’t be a competitor to Google anyway.
Baidu, China’s leading search engine with 76% market share, only has a 1.21% market share globally.
Considering the popularity of ByteDance, its search engine can be a threat to Baidu.
ByteDance is currently the highest valued startup worldwide, and it makes its launch of own search engine particularly notable.
In 2017, ByteDance acquired Musical.ly and turned it into TikTok. It was the most downloaded social media app within a year.
TikTok got more downloads than Instagram last year.
