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In a bold move to compete with industry giants like Google and Microsoft, Meta is reportedly developing its own artificial intelligence (AI)-powered search engine. As reported by The Information, the social media conglomerate aims to enter the search market to reduce its reliance on external sources like Google and Bing, which currently supply information for Meta's AI chatbots. With this ambitious endeavour, Meta seeks to claim its place in the competitive landscape of AI-driven search technologies alongside platforms like Perplexity.
The development of Meta’s AI search engine aligns with its broader goal of building an independent and robust AI ecosystem. Currently, Meta’s chatbots rely heavily on API requests from Google and Bing to fulfil user queries, a dependency that may be costly, especially if API requests continue to scale with user demand. A dedicated, in-house AI-powered search tool could allow Meta to autonomously gather and utilize web data, eliminating the need for external data sources and potentially creating a more cost-effective solution.
To achieve this, Meta has reportedly formed a specialized team tasked with creating the search engine. Evidence supporting this development came to light as web crawlers linked to Meta were detected combing through various websites, indicating an ongoing effort to gather and catalogue data. Web crawling is a fundamental process for search engines, allowing them to amass the data needed to accurately rank and present search results based on user input.
Another hint at Meta’s evolving AI portfolio is the recent release of NotebookLlama, an open-source, audio-based podcast generation tool, which appears to be a direct response to Google’s NotebookLM. NotebookLlama emphasizes Meta’s increasing focus on expanding AI applications, extending its scope to content creation in addition to information retrieval.
Nonetheless, it is still unknown how exactly Meta’s AI search engine is going to perform. Perplexity, for instance, has an AI-motivated search engine which synthesizes information from various sources to provide users with precise and relevant information. While details of Meta’s strategy are still available, one speculation about its AI-based search engine is that it would beat its competitors and be able to provide clear-cut and less complex information to users.
It is also not clear if Meta will release a separate search tool or integrate it into its already existing social networks. In any case, as the press reports, it is known that work on this project has been underway for eight months now, yet there have been no deadlines for launching it on the international market.
Considering that Google and Bing are already valid and functional competitors in the market, Meta making this step is going to be vital especially as it seeks new avenues on how to make use of AI while minimizing the role of other vendors. This is and will always be in Meta’s foresight which includes building a more self-sufficient ecosystem with less reliance on other platforms and services.
