Yahoo may not be the most headlined company in tech anymore, but its reach can’t be denied. With nearly 250 million monthly users across the country and 700 million globally, it’s still the second most popular email client in the world, and the third most popular search engine in the U.S. (even though that search engine has technically been powered by either Bing or Google since 2009).
As a privately owned company since 2021 (once worth $125 billion, but purchased for a mere $5 billion at the time), its CEO Jim Lanzone says that the last few years have been about “getting the house in order.” But now, he promises, “this is one of the biggest turnarounds people have tried in internet history.”
Lanzone says that turnaround begins with Yahoo Scout, which launches today in beta. In short, Yahoo Scout is a new, free AI search engine (it’s also an omnipresent button across Yahoo verticals like Finance, Sports, and Mail) that’s there to summarize the performance of a business or break down the key moments of a game.
In one mode, it’s essentially Yahoo’s version of Claude or ChatGPT. (Yahoo Answers for the AI era!) In the other, it’s an AI-translate button accompanying Yahoo’s editorial content, boiling down articles into takeaways. It will even summarize the sentiment of the comments on stories you read across Yahoo.
“We [aren’t] the first to market here, but in evaluating whether we should keep outsourcing or build the AI layer ourselves, it just became clear that we could do this best for our users,” says Lanzone. “We had a lot of unique assets to do that. And so in that context, timing is almost irrelevant, right? Because this is about Yahoo users on Yahoo, searching on Yahoo, versus what they were getting before.”
Led by Eric Feng, SVP & general manager of the Yahoo Research Group—who is best known for recruiting and leading the technical team that created Hulu—it’s powered by a combination of Yahoo’s knowledge graph, Anthropic’s Claude, and Bing’s open web APIs. (Yahoo says that user data is kept internally and does not train Claude or Bing.)
Yes, that means Yahoo is still relying on external partners, but the team says that search will feel like Yahoo because it’s so based within the Yahoo ecosystem. Specifically, Yahoo Scout can answer a question with everything Claude knows within its LLM (and gosh, does Yahoo Scout love to build a table breaking down information!) And it can also search the web itself as well as Bing.
