By David Pierce
Publication Date: 2026-01-27 15:00:00
Yahoo’s big AI play is, in many ways, actually a return to the company’s roots. Three decades ago, Yahoo was known as “Jerry’s guide to the world wide web,” and was designed as a sort of all-encompassing portal to help people find good stuff on an increasingly large, hard-to-parse internet. In the early aughts, the rise of web search more or less obviated that whole idea. But now, Yahoo thinks, we’ve come back around.
With a new product called Scout, Yahoo is trying to return to being that kind of guide to the web — only this time, with a whole bunch of AI in the mix. Scout, in its early form, is a search portal that will immediately be familiar if you’ve ever used Perplexity or clicked over to Google’s AI Mode. It shows a text box and some suggested queries. You type a question; it delivers 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, 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 AI web search. You get it. And so far, it’s the most search-y of any similar product I’ve tried. I like it a lot.
Scout has two jobs, really. The first is just to be a guide, to find stuff on the web. “It’s moved from ‘how do I find things on the internet’ to weeding through clickbait and now AI slop,” says Eric Feng, who runs Yahoo’s…
