Meta is reportedly developing a search engine index specifically designed for its AI chatbot. The goal? To generate AI-powered summaries of current events and significantly reduce its reliance on Google. This bold move signals Meta’sevolution into a more autonomous AI search engine, potentially positioning itself as a competitor to Google in the ever-growing AI search landscape.
Meta-ExternalAgent: Crawling Towards Independence
Since this past summer, Meta has been actively crawling the internet via its user agent, Meta-ExternalAgent. Reports across forums, including Hacker News and WebmasterWorld, highlight instances of excessive crawling, with one user claiming the bot hit their site over 50,000 times. While Meta claims its bot respects robots.txt, some suggest the botskipped checking it altogether during its early activity. This erratic behavior may have been the result of an unrefined system, which seems to have stabilized over time.
The apparent purpose of this bot is to create summaries of search results, with the ultimate aim of decreasing Meta’sdependency on major players like Google and Bing.
The Big Question: Is This Meta’s Challenge to Google?
All signs point to a potential showdown between Meta and Google in the AI search arena. Meta’s search index initiative is designed to complement its AI chatbot, which, as reported by The Verge, generates summaries of current events for users.
At the moment, Meta AI still leans on Google’s search index for accurate information. For instance, a search within Meta AI about Game Four of the World Series produced an accurate summary that linked directly to Google.
However, with its own search index in development, Meta appears poised to break away and carve out its own space in the AI-driven search ecosystem. Whether this is merely an enhancement to Meta AI or a full-fledged challenge to Google’s search supremacy remains to be seen.
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