Meta could develop an AI-powered search engine

Meta is reportedly developing an artificial intelligence (AI) search engine. According to a report, the social media giant is looking to compete with existing players such as Google, Microsoft’s Bing and DuckDuckGo. The company is reportedly planning to use AI for the search engine, likely giving it a Perplexity-like avatar. Important details about the implementation of the platform are currently missing. It is believed that the company wants to reduce dependence on other search engines to collect 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 internal AI search engine. Citing people familiar with the matter, the publication claimed that Meta has set up a special team to develop the search engine. This matches an earlier one report that the company’s web crawlers were spotted in large numbers on the Internet. This is usually important to obtain relevant data to rank websites and content when a query is submitted.

An AI-powered search engine is not a new concept. Perplexity is one of the biggest players in this field, offering its AI platform that manages information from multiple sources to present the most relevant output in an easy-to-read format. While the report didn’t share any details about Meta’s implementation of the AI ​​search engine, it’s likely that it could also work in a similar way.

Currently, the Meta AI chatbot uses Google Search and Microsoft Bing to find web information for user queries. This could be an expensive endeavor for the company, as API requests can accumulate in large quantities, and the social media giant has not monetized its AI chatbots.

It is difficult to say whether Meta aims to create a specific search engine domain or use the opportunity to reduce dependence on Google and Microsoft for web search capabilities. This can only be known once the company makes an official statement about this. The report did not mention a launch timeline for the AI ​​search engine, but noted that a team has been working on it for the past eight months.