Yahoo Scout: An AI-powered search engine to rival ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google

Yahoo’s big AI play is actually a return to the company’s roots in many ways. Three decades ago, Yahoo was known as “Jerry’s Guide to the World Wide Web,” designed to be a one-stop portal to help people find good stuff on an increasingly large and difficult-to-analyse Internet. In the early 2000s, the advent of web search more or less eschewed this whole idea. But now, Yahoo thinks we’re back.

With a new product called searchlightYahoo is trying to get back to being that kind of directory for the web — only this time, with a whole bunch of artificial intelligence in the mix. Scout, in its early form, is a search portal that will be instantly familiar if you’ve ever used Perplexity or tapped into Google’s AI mode. A text box and some suggested queries appear. You write a question. Provides an answer. Right now, Scout is a tab in Yahoo’s search engine (which CEO Jim Lanzone likes to remind me every time we talk, and which is somehow 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 an AI-powered web search. I got it. By far, it is the most searched for of any similar product I have tried. I like it very much.

Scouting has two jobs, really. The first is to just be a guide for finding things on the web. “It’s gone from ‘how do I find things on the Internet’ to weeding out clicks, and now artificial intelligence,” says Eric Feng, who runs Yahoo’s research group and leads the Scout Project. But Scout’s mission is also to bring AI and AI summaries to all of Yahoo’s other products, and help Yahoo users bring all that disparate data together in one place.

In a funny twist, Yahoo may be perfectly positioned to do this well. Because Yahoo operates huge content verticals like sports and finance, with its own large newsroom and partnerships with many other publishers, it has a huge amount of high-quality reference material for Scout. It also has Yahoo Weather, Yahoo Mail, Yahoo Horscopes, Yahoo Shopping, Yahoo and many other things besides. Yahoo is a complete content machine, and it can just point LLM to all that content. “We’re the only ones who can take our user data, our usage data, our content, our relationships and our information, and combine that with everything we know about search into an AI-powered answer engine,” Lanzone says.

Google will likely take issue with this statement. It has many of the same features as Yahoo, a host of other benefits, and a much larger number of users. But Yahoo has one major advantage over Google: It doesn’t have an invincible search advertising giant to protect. Given the sheer size of its user base and revenue, Google will have to slow down its path to making AI Mode the face of Google Search, though that’s clearly the plan. Yahoo has no such concerns: Lanzone says Scout won’t replace standard Yahoo Search from day one, but he makes it pretty clear that’s the plan long before that.

However, there is still an action plan here. Scout launches with affiliate links in shopping results and an ad unit below some searches. All of the AI ​​search products seem to have decided that ads are the way to monetize AI, and Yahoo is set to get there quickly. Lanzone says the goal is to use advertising to keep Scouting free for everyone. “Maybe one day we will also have a paid tier, but organic search is very important,” he adds.

One thing Yahoo doesn’t do? Build your own foundation model. For one thing, Lanzone says, it’s very expensive to do so. “We believe we can better serve our users not through the form, but through the underlying data and personalization data that we can add on top of other people’s forms,” he says. Scout is based on Claude’s anthropic model, and what Feng describes as “Yahoo Content, Yahoo Data, and Yahoo Personality.” Most web search data comes from the partnership with Microsoft and Bing, as has been the case for many years.

Everyone who searches with AI swears they care deeply about the future of the open web, but in my testing so far, Scout is the most advanced AI web search product yet. When Scout asked, “What’s the latest on this winter storm?” She responded with a one-paragraph summary that included three links highlighted prominently in blue. Next, I’ve got three sections with more details about what’s happening in my Virginia city, upcoming forecasts, and then a “Latest News” section with links to Yahoo stories, Yahoo partner stories, and other links around the web. In total, the page contains nine links, as well as a way to see all of the page’s resources at once.

When I did the same search on ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Mode, I got similar summaries, organized in similar ways. ChatGPT was the only one that linked more Prominently: A group of news links are pinned right at the top of the page. Otherwise, all three platforms seem to hide links behind light-colored icons or buttons — only Scout seems to want you to click on the links. Making sure people actually click on them will be critical to the rest of Yahoo’s business, and to keeping its newsroom partners and publishers with Scout around.

In my early tests of Scout, it seemed more like a search engine than an AI companion. His tone is very clear, and he doesn’t come across as a friend to talk to. It’s just a way to find information on the Internet, organized conversationally rather than a bunch of links. This doesn’t sound particularly new, but in a sea of ​​AI tools that like 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 tested. This is not enough to take on Google, but it is a good start.