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No Reason to Leave Facebook, With Meta AI Search Engine

By Laura Tucker
Meta Ai Search Engine Featured

It’s the goal of every website and app to keep you there as long as they can. With Meta owning Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger, there aren’t many reasons to leave the conglomerate. Meta is reportedly working on one less reason to leave: an AI-powered search engine.

Google Search and Bing to Get Competition

While existing search engines, including big guns Google Search and Bing, fight it out adding AI to their search engines, Meta is reportedly creating its own AI-powered search engine to challenge the others.

Like the others, the Meta search engine would display search summaries in the Meta AI chatbot. The chatbot Facebook and Instagram currently use gets help from Google and Bing. But now, it’s positioned to be their competitor.

Meta Ai Search Engine Chatbot
Open source: Unsplash

Nothing has been confirmed, but Meta has a web crawler that was seen doing its magic a while back. A source has repeatedly said that a team has been working for around eight months on creating the chatbot. Meta is also collecting location data to take on Google Maps.

I have to say, as much as I don’t always trust Google with my information, I don’t really trust Facebook more. I’m not likely to jump on the Meta AI Search team. Once Google started using the AI summaries, I jumped ship and went to DuckDuckGo, and I’m quite happy there.

Meta also signed a deal with Reuters to use its news content for the AI chatbot. It is believed to be the first agreement between Meta and a newsgroup for use with the chatbot.

Even More Competition

It’s believed that Meta isn’t alone in this pursuit, with Apple working on search as well and poised to replace Google Search on its products. That could hurt Alphabet quite a bit, as they have a contract worth upwards of $20 billion with Apple to make Google Search the default.

Meta Ai Search Engine Openai Gpts
Image source: Unsplash

Additionally, OpenAI announced that is working on its own search engine, to be called SearchGPT. The plans are for it to eventually become part of ChatGPT.

Just like laser engravers are the newest darling of gadget companies, AI chatbots are the new option for big tech companies. At a certain point with both of them, the market reaches a saturation point. A little competition is healthy, but an overabundance creates many losers and not many winners.

Image credit: Unsplash

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Laura Tucker Avatar
Laura Tucker
Laura has spent more than 20 years writing news, reviews, and op-eds, with the majority of those years as an editor as well. She has exclusively used Apple products for the past 35 years. In addition to writing and editing at MTE, she also runs the site’s sponsored review program.

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