Yahoo Debuts AI Search Tool ‘Scout’ to Challenge Google and Perplexity
Yahoo has also introduced an AI search tool known as Yahoo Scout, which is an official move by the company to enter the rapidly expanding AI search market dominated by Google, Perplexity, and ChatGPT.
Introduced on Tuesday, Scout is what can be described as an answer engine, which answers natural language queries by providing brief replies as opposed to the traditional lists of links. Yahoo had indicated that the tool uses the open web information alongside its own content ecosystem and user data to come up with responses.
The company claimed that Scout knows what hundreds of millions of user profiles know and has a huge scale knowledge graph, which enables it to help with tasks like weather tracking, sports event following, stock tracking, product comparison, and news story fact-checking.
However, Yahoo has collaborated with AI startup Anthropic to run the Claude model as the main foundation model of Scout. It is also implementing the Bing grounding API of Microsoft to make sure that the answers are backed up by the credible information of the open web.
Yahoo has introduced a new shopping functionality to condense the information in expert articles and reviews to compare brands and products in real time. The feature has been designed to offer shoppable links without having to open endless tabs.
The feature offers one-click access to real-time insights of company news, analyst ratings, financials, and earnings calls. The option is made to replicate clear analysis with fresh headlines every 10 minutes.
Scout is also available in the United States via Scout.Yahoo.com and the Yahoo Search application on both iOS and Android. According to Yahoo, the feature has the capacity to reach approximately 250 million users in the US, although functionality and personalisation have been intended to roll out over time.
Outside the independent search experience, Yahoo is rolling out Scout services on its ecosystem under what it termed the Scout Intelligence Platform. Yahoo Mail will have email summaries and extraction of actionable items, Yahoo Finance will have one-click stock analysis, and Yahoo News will have article highlights and daily audio digest summaries.
The development was headed by Eric Feng, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Yahoo Research Group, who was recruited some 6 months ago after being the founding CTO of Hulu. Feng said that Yahoo has a long-established knowledge base that enables it to provide guidance that can be trusted by its users.
Ami Vora, the Head of Product at Anthropic, said that it is what Claude was able to provide in scale that makes Yahoo Scout.
Yahoo comes into the market in the field of AI search as the third-largest search engine in the United States, with an estimated population of 250 million in the United States and more than 500 million user profiles worldwide. The company claims that it processes 18 trillion annual consumer signals in its properties.
Nevertheless, Google and OpenAI take up the space. Early testers at The Verge discovered that Scout gave more accurate responses to queries regarding the date of the start of the Winter Olympics than other search engines and provided nine links on a single results page, whereas competitors gave more links hidden behind icons or small buttons.
