TikTok, the short-form video-sharing and social networking app that has made people famous for lip-synching, hugging animals, or peeling a banana, is more popular than Google.

Taking over the internet toward the end of 2021, TikTok became a more dominant domain than Alphabet’s Google, the world’s No. 1 search engine, which owns 86 percent of the search market share, according to Cloudflare Inc., a cloud-infrastructure company that tracks internet traffic.

The TikTok app is owned by internet technology company ByteDance Ltd. of China, and it claimed earlier this year to have more than 1 billion monthly users, Wall Street Journal reported.

Its secret algorithm addicts people, delivering video clips that it thinks you would like. Amid TikTok’s spectacular popularity and looming dominance, President Donald Trump tried in September 2020 to force ByteDance to sell itself in the U.S. citing threats to user privacy and security posed by its Chinese ownership. Trump threatened to ban TikTok transactions if ByteDance didn’t sell TikTok within 45 days.

President Joe Biden revoked the ban.

Tik Tok started ranking No. 1 as the world’s most visited site in February 2021. From August on, it has landed in the top spot each month, according to Cloudflare, which says it uses data it on global internet traffic patterns, including app use and when a person visits a site on a web browser. 

The data used to create the Cloudflare report came not just from Google Search, but all of Google products that use the “Google.com” domain including Maps, Translate, Photos, News, and other tools. “What’s impressive about TikTok’s win here, is that it was done only using the single product,” Ben Schoon wrote for 9to5Google.

Like other social-media sites, TikTok attracts criticism for exposing children to videos about sex, drugs and eating disorders, Wall Street Journal reported.

You can see 17 of the most-watched TikTok videos here.

Photo: Popular social network apps. Credit: Wachiwit / iStock, https://www.istockphoto.com/portfolio/Wachiwit?mediatype=photography

Listen to GHOGH with Jamarlin Martin | Episode 74: Jamarlin Martin Jamarlin returns for a new season of the GHOGH podcast to discuss Bitcoin, bubbles, and Biden. He talks about the risk factors for Bitcoin as an investment asset including origin risk, speculative market structure, regulatory, and environment. Are broader financial markets in a massive speculative bubble?