Yahoo, one of the survivors of the original Dot Com bubble, was once a major player in the search engine space. Between them, Ask Jeeves, and Google, the company used to be a serious option when tracking down information online. If, hearing that the company’s search engine has recently undergone an upgrade, you were to say, “They’re still doing that?”, then you’re not alone.
And yet, here we are. Yahoo has announced a new proprietary “answer engine” that will run inside all of the company’s products, including the Search option that definitely still exists. Called Yahoo Scout, the service is powered by Claude AI as well as the purple company’s “unique data and user insights, as well as over 30 years of history in search.”
Yahoo!, really?
We’d have thought the company had learned its lesson about putting the word ‘answer’ in its product descriptions after what happened last time, but Scout will (hopefully) sidestep trolls and bad actors by having Anthropic’s Claude answering questions — however silly they may be. Claude is known to have used Reddit data for training, so perhaps expect some silly answers in return.
The American search company’s Scout platform is rolling out in beta to its “nearly 250 million users in the United States on desktop and mobile” across all of Yahoo’s services. It’ll offer “the best of traditional web search and generative AI search to deliver the right information and assistance at the right time for [the company’s] vast user base.”
Scout will provide summaries, shopping assistance, financial analysis (as well as “deeper insights through AI-powered questions”, and additional functions across the company’s Mail and sports offerings. How well it does at all of these will depend on the Claude integration and the efficacy of Yahoo’s database of data that’s supposed to inform this thing. The end goal, or at least one of them, is enhanced advertising. Because of course it is.
The company said that, over time, the “new answer engine will become more personalized, will add new capabilities focused on deeper experiences within key verticals, and will introduce new, improved opportunities for search advertisers to effectively cross the chasm to generative AI search advertising.”
