Meta is looking to develop its own search engine, enabling their AI chatbots to crawl the internet for information and directly answer users' queries about current events without always relying on Google Search and Microsoft's search engine Bing.
On Monday, October 28th, Eastern Time, according to a report by The Information, a source who spoke with Meta's search engine team revealed that the purpose of this move is to ensure that Meta has its own search engine to provide information to users in case Google and Bing cease their cooperation with Meta. Currently, Meta's AI users rely on data provided by Google and Bing when querying news, sports, and stock information.
In response to this news, Google's stock price briefly dropped by nearly 0.8% during the early morning trading session in the U.S. stock market, while Meta's stock price fluctuated around a 0.3% increase after initially rising by over 1.9%.
Meta Strives to Reduce Dependence on Other Tech Giants
Meta's founder, chairman, and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, is working to reduce Meta's dependence on other tech giants. Previously, Meta relied on Apple, but changes in Apple's rules made it more difficult for Meta to earn advertising revenue through iPhone apps, causing headaches for Zuckerberg.
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To address this challenge, Meta recently chose to collaborate with Reuters to enhance its AI's ability to respond to questions in the areas of current events and news, thereby reducing its reliance on Google and Bing. However, it is unclear whether Meta will need to pay Google or Microsoft to assist their chatbots in answering questions. Zuckerberg mentioned in April that there is "not much financial exchange" between Meta and Google, but did not provide further details.
Regardless of the current situation, Meta remains cautious about its future development as an increasing number of users are turning to AI applications like ChatGPT instead of traditional search engines like Google.
AI applications developed by OpenAI, such as ChatGPT, possess strong language understanding and generation capabilities, but they do not inherently have the ability to directly connect to the internet to obtain real-time information. Therefore, in some cases, they need to rely on external information sources, such as search engines like Microsoft Bing, to get the latest information. As one of OpenAI's main investors, Microsoft's search functionality is crucial for OpenAI's AI.
Meta AI is a core strategy for Meta, aimed at making users prefer their chatbots and spend more time on Meta's various applications. Meta wants these robots to be capable of handling significant tasks in the future, such as writing software or helping businesses with advertising. Meta has placed these chatbots in prominent positions within its own applications, making them easily accessible and allowing users to start conversations effortlessly on Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger.In August of this year, Zuckerberg revealed that Meta AI has over 185 million weekly active users, narrowing the gap with OpenAI's ChatGPT, which has 250 million weekly users. The purposes for which users employ these two chatbots may differ; Meta's bot is primarily used for social media, while ChatGPT is more frequently utilized by programmers for writing or checking code.
The search engine team at Meta AI is led by Senior Engineering Manager Xueyuan Su. This team has been working for at least eight months, and their task is to access various websites and organize web pages into a database. This process is known as web indexing, akin to cataloging web pages. In the future, Meta's AI will be able to consult this catalog to answer users' questions. Prior to this, the existence of this team was not known to the public.
Meta's web crawling technology has been public since July. Meta stated that they use this crawler "to train AI models or to improve products by directly indexing content online." However, some websites, such as The New York Times, do not allow Meta's bots to access their content.