Meta Allegedly Building Own Search Engine, Scraping Web at Massive Scale

churchkey · x · 2026-08-07

According to indie hacker @levelsio, a Meta staff member revealed that the company is building its own search engine. The goal is to make Meta AI's web searches independent of Google, preventing Google from using that search data for their own model training. Meta aims to build a proprietary web index for its AI.

Additionally, @levelsio noticed abnormally massive scraping of their sites by Meta this week, triggering server load alerts. The scraping seems to target image services as well as text, suggesting Meta might be collecting massive training data for an image, video, or world model.

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