Meta Platforms, the group behind Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and most of the other time-wasters that try to convince you to buy things, has a new target. Mark Zuckerberg’s suite of companies is exploring the search market.
The stated reason for this, according to The Information, is to reduce Meta’s reliance on Google and Microsoft. Given how the largest search platform on the planet is decaying in real time, that’s not the worst idea the social media giant has come up with.
A new Meta
Whether Meta’s take on search is any better than the decaying husks of once-useful services we currently use is up for debate. The platform will power its search ambitions with artificial intelligence. This approach could produce wildly inconsistent results for users but it’s hard to see how it could be (much) worse than what Google does now.
But if there’s a way to do search worse than the formerly-great market leader, Meta will probably find it. Current plans entail letting users ask a chatbot service questions about news and current events. An AI will crawl the internet to provide the answers to these questions. The Meta AI chatbot will serve up information on demand. There’s no possible way this could go badly.
Zuckerberg’s new-sniffing AI is in for a ton of competition. Google’s Gemini, Microsoft’s OpenAI-powered offerings, and Amazon’s ill-defined (so far) solution are all trying to jump on the AI market in a bid to be the largest gorilla in the cage. If nothing else, it’ll give Zuck’s platform another avenue for user information that can be tied to advertising spend.