Hyderabad: Meta seems to be working on a search engine powered by artificial intelligence, which could either compete with existing players like Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo or reduce Meta AI's search engine dependency for web searches. The Information cited people familiar with the matter to claim that the social media giant has set up a dedicated team for the task and has already started work on the AI search engine.
Although the new report does not include details about the engine's implementation, it corroborates an earlier report hinting at Meta's plans to develop a search engine. Back in August, the company's web crawlers were spotted in large numbers scouring the web. Notably, such an activity is important to get relevant data for ranking websites and content when users make a search query on the search engine.
Meanwhile, the AI-powered aspect of the search engine is not new. Perplexity is already as a significant player in this field, which gathers information from various sources to provide relevant, easy-to-read results. Meta's AI search engine might function similarly, but it is not easy to predict the exact outcome since the report does not share any details about Meta's implementation of the engine.
It is uncertain whether Meta plans to develop its own search engine or simply reduce dependence on Google and Microsoft for web searches for Meta AI. The company chatbot, currently, relies on Google Search and Microsoft Bing for web information. However, this approach could be costly due to the high volume of API requests.
Things could get a bit clearer once the company makes an official statement. The report has not provided any launch timeline for Meta's AI-powered search engine but mentioned that the dedicated team for the project has been working on the platform for the past eight months.
