Could Meta build its own search engine, and what might that look like?
Meta is reportedly planning to build its own search tool for Meta AI as a means of reducing reliance on Google and Microsoft's Bing for web searches within its AI chatbot.

There are several angles to the story, but Meta seems to be trying to perfect its data-gathering process in building more potent, real-time AI data tools. Eventually, that may mean a broader search tool within Meta to power real-time insights within its applications. That may prove especially useful for Threads in sharing up-to-date notes about the latest news along with engagement within the app.

When Meta first rolled out its Meta AI chatbot last September, it elaborated on how it was going to utilize web search results from Bing to augment its responses:

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

When Meta AI uses Bing for information in order to frame its responses, Meta links the web query.
In April this year, Meta reported a new collaboration with Google, where it will complement its web search responses through similar web link on replies powered by Google.

Finally, now, as per recent reporting from The Information, Meta is going to try building its web crawler independent of its reliance on a web crawler through its Search Partners for powering Meta AI.

As reported in The Information:

"As Meta Platforms tries to catch up to OpenAI in 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, that would give Meta an alternative, in case Microsoft or Google, both of whom are competing with Meta on generative AI development, decided to end their search deals.

But that also means that Meta would need to build a complex search system, which crawls the web in a pretty similar way to both Google and Bing. Which is a big undertaking, and why Meta went with these partnerships in the first place.

But could Meta really develop a web crawler similar to that and would it be good enough to produce enough answers in Meta's chatbot?

Besides, Meta already has various web crawlers that currently collect data from external websites, and these are activities that have increased in the past couple of months as Meta continues to seek more data for its AI projects. They might also currently be collecting data for this new search engine, but a dedicated Facebook search engine, again, would be a huge project.

Although a focused search engine makes some sense in the more general information gathering sense, that would also provide Meta with a lot more data to train future AI language models. Perhaps that's actually the bigger picture here and not just in-stream search.

It's more likely true that Meta is consolidating its sources of data into tools for its AI machine while utilizing its existing spiders merely to scrape whatever is provided by external providers with sites which haven't implemented sufficient robots.txt protections, or better, not refreshed those protections. And would be able to rely heavily on its already bulking stores of data: Should it already be assembling said information, it will indeed want to minimize that dependent relationship with external search suppliers wherever possible.
Maybe it is more about making the best use of its own data gathering processes rather than building a competitor to these providers. Even so, it is a pretty big undertaking that could provide expanded opportunities for Zuck and Co., if they can get it right.

Really, though, it is not an unexpected move given the competition in the space. Again, Meta is battling with these two providers for AI supremacy, and as the race continues to heat up, it will come as no surprise if they stop helping Meta in this regard.