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Meta has been quietly building a search engine to power its Meta AI chatbot, lessening its reliance on those of rivals like Google and Microsoft.
Why It Hits: Data is gold in the world of AI — how it’s collected and how it’s controlled. With chinks forming in Google’s search dominance and chatbots generating a new way for consumers to find information, search market-share is shifting.
Between the Queries: According to The Information, Meta wants info about current events, sports, stocks, and other topics to come directly from the company itself — not an outside partner.
- It put a team under senior engineering manager Xueyuan Su eight months ago to crawl the web and create databases around the information collected — known as “web indexing.”
- Some publishers, like NYT, have already blocked Meta’s web crawler (like they did with OpenAI and other rivals).
- However, Meta did strike a deal with Reuters to license data — the first AI-focused news deal for the company.
The Future: A strong search business is one of the backbones of a strong ad business, which is the biggest revenue driver for Big Tech. Meta AI could supercharge that revenue — it already has 185 million users and is embedded across all of Meta’s apps. A fully functioning search engine would protect Meta from the possibility of losing access to Google Search or Microsoft Bing — echoes of how changes to Apple’s OS kneecapped Meta’s ad business. Big Tech may be becoming more siloed in order to service a user’s every whim… and reap all the benefits.
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