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Yahoo is betting the house on its new AI, from search to all its services

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Yahoo is betting the house on its new AI, from search to all its services

Since August 2010, typing into Yahoo Search has meant getting a list of purple links yodeled by Microsoft Bing. That changes today. The Sunnyvale, California, company has rebuilt its engine powering its search using Scout, its AI answer engine launched as a beta in January. Eric Feng, senior vice president and general manager of the Yahoo Research Group, calls it “truly the biggest update that we’ve made to Yahoo search in years.” Scout is also colonizing all of Yahoo’s properties.

Feng showed me Scout over a video demo, and the redesign makes sense. Everything starts with a single input field and a choice right under it: Search or Scout. Pick Search, and Yahoo builds a results page around your query, mixing quick facts, links, and short AI summaries of news and different bits of information. Pick Scout, and you get a conversation with the AI, which cites its sources with inline links. The two views of the same query sit side by side. 

Whatever you pick, you can quickly flip between the two views by clicking on a Search/Scout switch that is placed at the top of the window. Yahoo calls this Pivot Search. You can also “pivot” to Scout by clicking on a follow-up question or any other thing that shows the Scout icon. According to Feng, it’s AI and search fused into one experience, letting you “move seamlessly between those two types of experiences.”

Scout started as a standalone answer engine built on Yahoo’s knowledge graph, a giant database of people, places, and things, powered by Bing and Anthropic’s Claude.


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