• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, October 28, 2024

Meta Platforms developers are working on a search engine to crawl the web and provide conversational answers about current events to people using Meta’s AI chatbot. 

The goal is to reduce reliance on outside sources such as Google Search and Microsoft Bing. The information is related to news, sports and stocks, according to The Information, which cited a person involved in the project.

Meta AI Senior Engineering Manager Xueyuan Su is reportedly leading the search project.

Saul Marquez, CEO at full-service marketing agency Outcomes Rocket, compared Meta’s decision to Microsoft’s partnership with OpenAI when it integrated data into Bing and users began getting different results.

“When Google created its own version of gen-AI search, it changed everything,” he says. “You now get your answers from AI rather than Google taking you to a page with an authoritative voice or a news article to provide the answer.”

This is changing media and search engine optimization strategies, Marquez says, and Meta’s change is part of the company’s independence off and on its platforms. “One of the goals of social is to keep the user on the platform,” he adds.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg last week said Meta AI has nearly 500 million monthly active users and believes that the AI assistant is on track to become the most used assistant across the world.

The company reportedly has been indexing the web for eight months with a goal to integrate the indexes into Meta AI.

Meta publicly disclosed its web crawling technology this past summer. It described it as the “Meta-ExternalAgent crawler crawls the web for use cases such as training AI models or improving products by indexing content directly.”

Last week Meta reported that its AI chatbot will use Reuters content to answer user questions in real time about news and current events. The companies did not disclose the partnership’s financial details. Reuters will be compensated for its journalism in a multi-year deal.

In April, Meta released Meta AI built on Llama 3. It became available in most countries across Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger. It was first announced Meta AI at last year’s Connect.