What limits the amount of results?

There is a limit from TT system. For more detail, it could be affected from the hashtag popularity, the time limit you set for the run (WEEK, MONTH, YEAR...) and finally, TT can not serve all video from a hashtag because it need a deep scan on their database. In practical, we can reach under 10k videos with a popular hashtag.

Hi Novi! With hashtags it works well. I even managed to get a dataset with 35K. But with this actor I'm using keywords ... and only get a couple of hundred results. Therefore I was wondering, if these 2 actors work differently ... or if it might have something to do with the way I am using or configuring the "Advanced Search Tiktok API" actor.

So is there a general difference between the "Advanced Search Tiktok API" and the "Multiple Tiktok Hashtag API"? Or are the differences in results rather due my way of using the search actor?

Hello judgereini,

We got it. Could you share your run to us can inspect on it? Thank you so much!

Hi Novi!

Here is a run done with the hashtag actor: https://console.apify.com/view/runs/KbczlGjCXIanDVtE7 ... 35K results. Amazing :-)))

And here are the test runs with the search actor: https://console.apify.com/view/runs/vK1BBIbS5gh1GJwx8 https://console.apify.com/view/runs/ulEEgcF4M2Dovgdfa https://console.apify.com/view/runs/zffv7VQMdJF6LSP6X https://console.apify.com/view/runs/eDlh7O0zk7H5vvtbU

Can you spot the difference?

Hi judgereini, Thank you for sharing your runs with us. We've checked these keyword on a TT mobile app and found that they are has limited result. We also got several hundreds videos.

The reason behind this, from software engineering, we can understand that searching is a expensive operation. If TT haven't indexed them already, their system need to make a expensive scan to disk to find video for you. This is why TT can only provide you a limited number of unpopular videos.

Hashtag, they like indexes, so TT can easily provide you more videos, especially in popular hashtags.

Solution for getting more video on searching is you can try search the same keyword multiple times, this will make TT go deeper in their storage and give you more video on that keyword.

We hope this answer will make you satisfy! Best regard.

Hi Novi!

Thanks a lot for the detailed explanation! I will give this a try and see if we can pull more results with a very common search keyword.

Kind regards, Christian

Hi Novi!

I've tested your theory on my test account ...

I used a list of top searches on TikTok: https://explodingtopics.com/blog/popular-searches-on-tiktok

Music (150 Mio searches on TT): https://console.apify.com/view/runs/eAAvC7kj7Jhy5Io4y ... 370 results Roblox (67 Mio searches on TT): https://console.apify.com/view/runs/4M7RUeaNnYEAU5ixr ... 296 results TikTok (67 Mio searches on TT) https://console.apify.com/view/runs/yYqf2apgZ95se3gSsn ... 33 results

So it seems there is no relation between output of your search actor and actual searches on TT. Hopefully, you find something else that limits the results ... and get rid of that limit ;-)

I wish you all the best!

Kind regards, Christian

Hello Christian,

We tried with keyword "music" on TT app and see they only give us about hundreds results. We think they limited number of result. Maybe you need to retry same keyword in different countries to get more videos.

Best regard,

Hi Novi!

OK. Understood! Thanks for investigating this! And thanks for your answer!

Best, Christian