“Sociable” is the latest commentary on important social media developments and trends from industry expert Andrew Hutchinson of Social Media Today.

Could Meta create its own search engine, and if it did, what would it look like?

Reports have been published that Meta seeks to create its own search tool for Meta AIto reduce its reliance on Google and Microsoft’s Bing for web searches within its artificial intelligence chatbot.

There are several potential angles to the news, but it appears Meta is looking to expand its data collection process in order to continue building more powerful real-time AI data tools. This could result in a broader metasearch tool, providing real-time information for its applications. This is something that could have particular value for Threads, providing up-to-the-minute notes on developing news to complement in-app engagement.

When Meta first announced its Meta AI chatbot in September last yearhe explained how he would use Bing’s web search results to expand his answers:

“In text chats, Meta AI has access to real-time information through our search partnership with Bing and offers an image generation tool.

When Meta AI answers use Bing for contextual information, Meta provides a web link to the search query.

Then, in April of this year, Meta announced an additional partnership with Google to expand its web search answers even further, providing a similar web link on the answers provided by Google.

And now, according to The informationMeta is looking to create its own web crawler to power search queries independently, to reduce its reliance on its search partners for Meta AI.

According to The information:

“As meta-platforms tries to follow OpenAI in the development of artificial intelligence, the Facebook owner is working on a search engine that crawls the web to provide conversational answers about current events to people using its Meta AI chatbot.

Conceptually, this would give Meta an alternative, in case Microsoft or Google, both of which compete with Meta in the development of generative AI, decide to end their research agreements.

But it would also mean that Meta would have to create a complex search system, one that crawls the web in the same way that Google and Bing do. It’s a big company and that’s why Meta went for these partnerships in the first place.

But could Meta actually create a web crawler that works in the same way and would it be sufficient to provide adequate responses in Meta’s chatbot?

Meta has already various web crawlers which collect information from external websites, and these crawlers have been an increase in activity in recent monthsas Meta seeks to collect more data for its AI projects. They could also already be collecting data for this new search engine, but a dedicated search engine for Facebook, again, would be a big project.

While a dedicated search engine is a logical development in the broader sense of information gathering, it would also give Meta more data for its AI language models in the future. Maybe that’s actually the bigger picture, as opposed to just powering InStream search.

It’s more likely that Meta is beefing up its data sources to power its AI tools and using its existing crawlers to scrape whatever data it can from external providers that haven’t updated their robots.txt protections. This would help Meta build on its already vast data stores, and if it already collects this information, it makes sense to also reduce its reliance on external search providers where possible.

So perhaps it’s less about creating a competitor for these providers and more about getting the most out of its own data collection processes. But even so, it’s a significant undertaking, one that could provide expanded opportunities for Zuck and Co., if they can get it right.

In reality, this is not an unexpected decision, given the competition in this area. Once again, Meta is battling with these two vendors for AI supremacy, and as the race continues to heat up, it wouldn’t be surprising if they stopped helping Meta in this regard.