Never used TikTok. I guess one searches "How to do X?" and shows tutorial videos each a mintue or so? Or "the Best birthday gifts" then a bunch of video trys to sell you the "best" gift? I have no idea.

Badly. You search for videos that match the form of a question. It’s not effective at all, but wildly popular according to my aunt who is a high school teacher.

The accessibility of technology has produced a generation of people who don’t understand how to use it in basic ways, but that’s another discussion.

I have given it a try a few times, to see if it makes sense to search on tiktok. I tried things like "[generic topic I'd like to know more about]", "history of [topic]", "[topic] lecture/course", "how to replace screen of [phone model]", "how to fix [device model]", "how to make [recipe]", [product] review, [software] tutorial, and a few others, both in english and in my mother language, and in all cases, the results were poor, barely related to my search or nonexistent.

It makes me wonder if: 1- people don't actually search on tiktok as much as people make it look like 2 - there's some different way to write the search terms that I'm unaware of, or perhaps, the results would be different if I was logged in 3 - people are simply getting poor results and that's it 4 - my search interests differ too much from what people search on tiktok