I can't help but think that this whole "TikTok is a search engine" school of thought comes straight from Google, which is doing its best to convince regulators worldwide that it doesn't have monopoly power in search.

Even in this article, the only source of TT's amazing search engine prowess is....a Google exec. How would they even have enough TikTok data to make such an estimation? All activity happens inside the app, so it's not even like Google could ballpark it based off Chrome browser sessions or something.