Meta reportedly wants to take over search and is using AI to do it

Key Takeaways

Meta is reportedly developing its own AI search engine.
The reason? Meta wants to move away from using Google Search and Microsoft Bing in favor of its own search platform.
Just recently, Meta signed a deal with Reuters to have its news show up in Meta’s AI chatbot.

Meta is coming for you, Google and Microsoft.

AI search engineshave gained increasing popularity in the past year. These search engines deliver answers to users instantly, rather than having the user do the digging themselves. A well-known AI search engine is Perplexity, but it’s been bogged down recently by legal issues.

Meta, sensing an opportunity to grow and become more self-sufficient, is now reportedly entering the AI search engine race, according to The Information. Currently, when you use Meta AI’s search function, it uses Google Search and Microsoft’s Bing to find real-time information on your search query.

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Other AI search engines like ChatGPT and Perplexity have taken off recently

If Meta is indeed developing its own AI search engine, it has one goal in mind: to no longer rely on Microsoft’s or Google’s search engine. Meta is already making moves too. Just recently, it made a deal with Reuters to provide its news reports in its Meta AI chatbot responses.

Meta may also be noticing the trend of people abandoning traditional search engines like Google, and replacing them with AI search platforms like ChatGPT and Perplexity. Meta understandably wants a piece of this pie, and wants users to turn to its apps for searching. Its search engine would reportedly give AI-generated search summaries within the Meta AI chatbot. The bot is currently built into Instagram and Facebook.

Meta was found in August to be stealthily using webcrawlers to source training data for its Meta AI. Plus, it’s even using photos, videos, and messages from both Instagram and Facebook to train its AI model. Reportedly, the team behind the new Meta search engine has already been organizing its database and indexing sites for more than a few months too.

In July, ChatGPT announced it was working on its own AI search engine called SearchGPT. With that in mind, Meta surely has its work cut out for it. There’s certainly no lack of competition.