Yahoo’s big AI work is, in many ways, really a return to the company’s roots. Three decades ago, Yahoo was known as “Jerry’s guide to the World Wide Web,” and it was designed as a kind of omnichannel portal to help people find good things on the increasingly large, difficult-to-parse Internet. Early on, the rise of web search more or less killed that whole idea. But now, Yahoo thinks, we’re back.
Called with a new product scoutYahoo is trying to be that kind of guide on the web — only this time, with a whole bunch of AI in the mix. Scout, in its initial form, is a search portal that will look instantly familiar if you’ve ever used Perplexity or clicked on Google’s AI mode. This shows a text box and some suggested questions. You type a question; This gives an answer. Right now Scout is a tab in Yahoo’s search engine (which, as CEO Jim Lanzon likes to remind me every time we talk, is still the third-most popular search engine in the US), a standalone web app, and a central feature in the new Yahoo Search mobile app. Yahoo calls it an “answer engine,” but it’s AI web search. You got this. And so far, it’s the most searched for of any similar product I’ve tried. I like it very much.
Actually the scout has two jobs. The first is just to be a guide, finding stuff on the web. “It’s gone from ‘how do I find things on the Internet’ to clickbait and now AI slop,” says Eric Feng, who runs Yahoo’s research group and led the Scout project. But Scout’s job is also to bring AI summaries and smarts to all of Yahoo’s other products, and help Yahoo users pull all the different data into one place.
In a strange twist, Yahoo may be in the perfect position to do this well. Because Yahoo runs huge content verticals like sports and finance, with a large newsroom of its own and partnerships with many other publishers, it has a large amount of high-quality reference content to scout. It also has Yahoo Weather and Yahoo Mail and Yahoo Horoscopes and Yahoo Shopping and many other things besides Yahoo. Yahoo is an absolute content machine, and it can only point one LLM at all that content. “We are the only ones who can take our user data, our usage data, our content, our relationships and information, and combine everything we know about search into an AI answer engine,” Lanzone says.
Google would likely take issue with that statement. It has many of the same advantages as Yahoo, and many other advantages, and a lot of users. But Yahoo has one important win over Google: It doesn’t have a huge, unstoppable search-advertising business to protect. Due to the sheer scale of both its user base and its revenues, Google will have to slow down its pace in making AI mode the face of Google Search, even if that’s clearly the plan. Yahoo has no such concerns: Lanzone says Scout won’t replace standard Yahoo Search from day one, but makes clear that’s the plan much sooner.
However, there is still a business plan here. Scout is launching with affiliate links for shopping results and an ad unit below some searches. It seems like all the AI search products are deciding that ads are the way to make money from AI, and Yahoo is ready to get there quickly. The goal, Lanzone says, is to use ads to keep Scout free for everyone. He adds, “Maybe one day we’ll have a paid tier, but free search is extremely important.”
One thing Yahoo isn’t doing? Creating your own foundation model. For one thing, Lanzon says, it’s very expensive to do. “We think we can serve our users as well not just with models, but with grounding data and personalization data we can add on top of other people’s models,” he says. Scout is based on Anthropic’s cloud model, and what Feng describes as “Yahoo content, Yahoo data, Yahoo personality.” Most web-search data comes from a partnership with Microsoft and Bing, as it has for many years.
Everyone who does AI search swears that they care deeply about the future of the open web, but in my testing so far, Scout is the most web-forward AI search product yet. When I asked Scout, “What’s the latest on this winter storm?” It responded with a one-paragraph summary that included three links highlighted prominently in blue. After that, I got three sections of more details about what’s happening in my Virginia city, the upcoming forecast, and then a “Latest News” section with links to Yahoo stories, Yahoo Partner stories, and other links on the web. In total, the page contained nine links, as well as a way to view all of the page’s sources at once.
When I did the same search on ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Mode, I found similar summaries structured in a similar way. ChatGPT was the only one to link More Prominently: It stuck a carousel of news links at the top of the page. Additionally, all three platforms seem to hide links behind icons or light-colored buttons – only Scout actually wants you to click on the link. Making sure people actually click on them will be critical to the rest of Yahoo’s business and to Scout’s survival while keeping its newsrooms and publisher partners engaged.
In my early tests of Scout, it feels more like a search engine than an AI companion. Its tone is very straightforward, and it doesn’t behave like a friend to talk to. It is a way of finding information on the Internet that is organized interactively, rather than through a set of links. It doesn’t sound particularly new, but in a sea of AI tools that would prefer to pretend the Internet doesn’t exist at all, it’s a refreshingly useful take on the genre. I don’t think I’ve intentionally used Yahoo Search in a decade, but when I wanted to know when the Winter Olympics started, Scout gave me a better answer than any other search engine I’ve tested. It’s not enough to compete with Google, but it’s a good start.
