Meta Platforms is developing an AI-powered search engine to reduce its dependence on Google Search and Microsoft Bing. This new search engine aims to provide conversational answers about current events via Meta's AI chatbot. The initiative is part of Meta's broader strategy to keep up with OpenAI in artificial intelligence development.

Key Points

• Objective: Meta aims to lessen its reliance on Google and Microsoft for providing information about news, sports, and stocks through its AI chatbot.
• Backup Plan: The new search engine would serve as a contingency if Google or Microsoft decide to end their search deals with Meta.
• Complexity: Building a search engine that crawls the web like Google and Bing is a significant undertaking, which is why Meta initially partnered with these companies.
• Existing Infrastructure: Meta already has various web crawlers that gather information from external websites, and these have been ramping up activity recently.
• Data Gathering: The new search engine could be part of a broader strategy to gather more data for Meta's AI language models, potentially reducing reliance on external search providers.
• Bigger Picture: The focus might be on shoring up data sources to power AI tools rather than just creating an in-stream search engine.

Meta's efforts to develop its own search engine could provide it with more control over data and reduce its dependency on external providers, aligning with its long-term AI development goals.