Meta is reportedly developing an artificial intelligence (AI) search engine. According to a report, the social media giant wants to compete with existing players such as Google, Microsoft’s Bing and DuckDuckGo. The company reportedly plans to use AI for the search engine, likely giving it a Perplexity-like avatar. Key details on the platform’s implementation are currently missing. The company is believed to want to reduce its reliance on other search engines to obtain data for its AI chatbots. Notably, Meta also released NotebookLlama, an open source audio podcast generation tool, to compete with Google’s NotebookLM.

The information reported that the social media giant has started work on an internal AI-powered search engine. Citing people familiar with the matter, the publication claims that Meta has set up a dedicated team to develop the search engine. This corroborates a precedent report that the company’s web crawlers have been spotted in large numbers scouring the Internet. This is generally important for obtaining relevant data to rank websites and content when a search request has been sent.

An AI-powered search engine is not a new concept. Perplexity is one of the largest players in this space and offers its AI platform that organizes information from multiple sources to present the most relevant results in an easy-to-read format. While the report doesn’t share any details about Meta’s implementation of the AI ​​search engine, it’s likely that it could also work in a similar way.

Currently, the Meta-AI uses of chatbot Google Search And MicrosoftBing to find web information for user queries. This could prove costly for the company, given that API requests can accumulate in large volumes and the social media giant has not monetized its AI chatbots.

It’s difficult to say whether Meta aims to create a specific search engine domain or use this capability to reduce reliance on Google and Microsoft for web search capability. This can only be known once the company makes an official statement about it. The report does not highlight any timeline for launching the AI ​​search engine, but mentions that a team has been working on it for eight months.