After Perplexity, You.com, Brave, and OpenAI, Meta (Facebook’s parent company) is now reportedly developing its very own AI-powered search engine. A new report by The Information suggests that the company is developing its own search engine for the Meta AI chatbot, letting it provide answers on current events.
From the sound of it, Meta AI’s possibly new search powers will let it function like ChatGPT’s SearchGPT, Perplexity, and the lot. The new report indicates that this is an attempt to reduce Meta’s dependency on Google and Bing for latest search queries.
According to the report, an inside source involved with the search engine’s strategical development revealed that Meta’s proprietary web crawler will reply to queries with conversational answers on Meta AI. In other words, since Meta AI is already integrated within WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook, the new search engine will offer a more personalized and integrated user experience.
Meta’s new search engine could potentially offer a more comprehensive as well as engaging experience, in comparison to the conventional keyword-based search results that we are used to. However, building a search engine from scratch is quite a task and can take a lot of time. But, according to the latest report, Meta has reportedly been at it for around eight months now, building an information-rich database for the chatbot to refer to.
Besides, Meta’s web crawlers were spotted making rounds of the internet months ago, and it nicely falls in line with the new report. Besides, recently, Meta also sealed the deal with Reuters to use its news articles for citation when answering related queries.
While Meta’s AI-powered search engine is still in development, it poses a threat and challenge to Google’s domination in the search space. With more and more such companies joining in on the search engine wagon, it’s clearer than ever that search as we know it is set to change soon completely.
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