Meta is allegedly building their own search engine

[Starblazer]

Meta, the social media company that operates Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, and Threads, is allegedly crawling the web and in the process of building its own search engine. Meta wanted to build its own web search service since over a decade. Later, they partnered with Bing but the partnership abruptly ended after a couple of years.

As AI gold rush is in progress and most of the big tech companies are in the process of developing their own AI, Meta also needs a web index. However, crawling Google's SERPs will eventually help Google train their own AI models. So, Meta decided to crawl the web and probably build their own search engine.

Source:

https://twitter.com/x/status/2085467097405247945

 

[jayden24]

I think these AI developers need to understand that creating copycat versions of ChatGPT is not the solution anymore. It will only overcrowd the market.

 

[Venusaur]

Everything remains between the same hands, nothing new appears, all belongs to the same companies - Meta, Google, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Anthropic, OpenAI, meeeehh

Same shit as always, they won't revolutionize the industry, just another rehashed shit like Threads was for the social media industry

 

[Nikolaos]

Everything remains between the same hands, nothing new appears, all belongs to the same companies - Meta, Google, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Anthropic, OpenAI, meeeehh

Same shit as always, they won't revolutionize the industry, just another rehashed shit like Threads was for the social media industry

When there's profit in keeping things as they are, why would they revolutionize anything?

 

[IM Dude]

They do this to circumvent US antitrust law and cover for each other. So meta builds search engine. Google builds social media. Etc Etc.

 

[sharifawan]

Blocking or allowing their crawler is the thing worth deciding now. Block it, and you're invisible to whatever they build. Allow it and you're feeding a company that may never send you traffic. Most people won't decide either way, they'll just find out later what their robots.txt did.

And Meta doesn't need anyone to visit a search page. WhatsApp and Instagram are already open on the phone. If answers start showing up in there, that's people finding things somewhere you can't really rank.

Local might feel it first. Facebook already holds business details for millions of companies, and it's the listing nobody ever updates. Start cross-checking a fresh crawl against those old profiles, and every mismatch people have ignored since 2014 is suddenly worth something.

Doesn't change what you'd do this month though. Same content, same consistency. One more index to be right in.

 

[Starblazer]

Everything remains between the same hands, nothing new appears, all belongs to the same companies - Meta, Google, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Anthropic, OpenAI, meeeehh

Same shit as always, they won't revolutionize the industry, just another rehashed shit like Threads was for the social media industry

They do this to circumvent US antitrust law and cover for each other. So meta builds search engine. Google builds social media. Etc Etc.

Google tried to build a social media platform twice with Orkut (2004-14) & Google+ (2011-19) but failed. Social media is probably the only thing they couldn't conquer no matter how hard they try.

 

[morgans33]

its gonna be terrible for us webmasters bro they will just scrape all our content to feed their ai bots and never actualy send any real human traffic back to our sites

 

[IM Dude]

Google tried to build a social media platform twice with Orkut (2004-14) & Google+ (2011-19) but failed. Social media is probably the only thing they couldn't conquer no matter how hard they try.

Remember windows phone. Windows played the game of creating android like mobile os. They all create similar products and save each other from antitrust law.

 

[Ben Arthur]

Honestly this makes a lot of sense to me. Meta depending on Google or Bing was always going to bite them eventually. If they crawl the web themselves they finally get full control over their own data instead of just handing free information to their biggest rivals. And they can build this right into WhatsApp and Instagram without much friction. I am genuinely curious whether they actually roll out a full blown search engine or just keep it running quietly in the background.