Meta is reportedly developing an artificial intelligence (AI) search engine. According to a report, the social media giant wants to compete with existing players such as Google, Microsoft’s Bing, and DuckDuckGo. The company reportedly plans to use AI for the search engine, likely giving it a Perplexity-like avatar. Key details about the platform’s implementation are currently missing. It is believed that the company wants to reduce the reliance on other search engines to source data for its AI chatbots. Notably, Meta also released NotebookLlama, an open-source audio-based podcast generation tool, to compete with Google’s NotebookLM.
The Information reported that the social media giant has started work on an in-house AI search engine. Citing people familiar with the matter, the publication claimed that Meta has set up a dedicated team to develop the search engine. This corroborates with an earlier report that the company’s web crawlers were spotted in large numbers scouring the Internet. This is usually important to get relevant data to rank websites and content when a search request has been sent.
An AI-powered search engine is not a new concept. Perplexity is one of the biggest players in this space and offers its AI platform that curates information from multiple sources to present the most relevant output in a simple-to-read format. While the report did not share any details about Meta’s implementation of the AI search engine, it is likely that it could also work the same way.
Currently, the Meta AI chatbot uses Google Search and Microsoft Bing to find web information for user queries. This could be an expensive endeavour for the company given API requests can accumulate in large volumes, and the social media giant has not monetised its AI chatbots.
It is difficult to say whether Meta aims to create a specific search engine domain or use the capability to reduce the reliance on Google and Microsoft for web search capability. This can only be known once the company makes an official statement regarding the same. The report did not highlight any launch timeline for the AI search engine but mentioned that a team has been working on it for the last eight months.
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