Meta is working on a search engine for its AI chatbot to reduce its reliance on Google

Meta, formerly Facebook, is reportedly working on developing a search index for its AI chatbot. This is intended to reduce reliance on Google for generating current event summaries. But could this be a challenge for Google?

"The search engine will likely provide AI-generated search summaries of current events within the Meta AI chatbot."

🚀 Meta has been crawling the web with a user agent called Meta-ExternalAgent for some time now. There have been many reports of excessive crawling on various forums, with one person on Hacker News reporting getting 50,000 hits from this bot. That being said, it's important to note that while the documentation for Meta-ExternalAgent says it follows robots.txt rules, it wouldn't matter since the bot never visited the file.

• 📌 The main purpose of the bot is to generalize search results, and according to the results, its task is to reduce dependence on Google and Bing for search results.
• 📌 This could be a preliminary step to challenge Google (and other search engines) in the field of AI search.
• 📌 Meta AI chatbot looks like a search engine and is known to still use Google's search index.