Yahoo Rebuilds Search Around AI as Scout Spreads Across Its Empire

Yahoo has rebuilt its search engine around Scout, its AI answer engine, ending a run of Bing-powered link lists that dated to August 2010. 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 now spreading across every Yahoo property, from News to Finance to Firefox.

The redesign rests on a single input field with a choice beneath it: Search or Scout. Search builds a conventional results page mixing quick facts, links and short AI summaries. Scout opens a conversation with the AI, which cites its sources through inline links. A switch at the top of the window, which Yahoo calls Pivot Search, lets users flip between the two views of the same query. Feng describes it as AI and search fused into one experience, letting users "move seamlessly between those two types of experiences."

How does Scout work under the hood?

Scout launched as a beta in January. It started as a standalone answer engine built on Yahoo's knowledge graph — a database of people, places and things — powered by Bing and Anthropic's Claude. Since then, Feng says Yahoo has cut Scout's response time in half and replaced the single Claude model with several third-party models, including Google's Gemini. Each model gets assigned to the job it does best, depending on the query.

The models are rented, so someone has to pay the bill. For now, that is advertising. CEO Jim Lanzone says the goal is to use ads to keep Scout free for everyone. "Maybe one day we'll also have a paid tier," he said, "but free search is extremely important."

The page layout itself draws on roughly 10 months of beta data and about 3 billion Scout responses. The lesson: whatever you type should decide what the page looks like. Weather, sports, finance, entertainment, celebrities and news each get a tailored layout.

Search for the Chicago Bears, and the top of the page fills with glanceable facts — the last game, the next one, the coach — followed by news stories with short "AI takeaways," shopping links and follow-up questions. Search for Netflix, and Yahoo assumes you want to reach Netflix. "I don't want to read an explanation like, oh, how does Netflix's recommendation system work?" Feng says. The AI answer stays on the page, "but look how far down we've slotted it." Ask how to calculate compound interest, and the explanation leads instead. "Right now the users often need to understand the answer before they ask the question, which is strange," he says.

How does this compare with Google?

Google is moving toward the same conclusion. According to Search Engine Roundtable, since November 2 its AI Overviews for brand searches in the U.S. have shifted to the right-hand column on desktop, out of the way of links. For some queries, the summary opens to full length with a chat box underneath. But Google keeps rearranging AI pieces on a page originally built for blue links, while treating AI Mode as just another search type. Yahoo's Pivot Search, by contrast, puts the flip between modes at the center of the interface.

Where else does Scout show up?

Scout is colonizing Yahoo's services well beyond the search box:

• On Yahoo News and Yahoo Sports, a floating button opens a Scout chat window with questions tailored to the story, supporting voice as well as text.
• In Sports, Scout knows which teams you follow.
• Yahoo Finance docks Scout on the right side of the page and lets it take actions, such as adding Nvidia's earnings date to your calendar or dropping Shopify into a stocks watchlist.
• Scout now lives in Mozilla's Firefox, the first deal of this kind for Yahoo's AI chat — mirroring Gemini in Chrome and Copilot in Edge.

Scout keeps memories to serve users better, Feng says. Show interest in Nvidia on Yahoo Finance, and Scout records it. Today, what you ask in Finance stays in Finance; Yahoo is weighing whether memories should carry across services. Feng notes users can control and disable the memories. "We want to give users complete control over their data," he says.

Yahoo also worked with ElevenLabs on a voice you can interrupt mid-answer, including a clone of cofounder Jerry Yang — which, given enough conversation, literally starts to yodel.

Whether the redesign dents Google or Microsoft remains open. Yahoo ranks third in search behind Microsoft, with both far behind Google. Feng points out that moving the needle just one point means billions in revenue and shareholder value. For Yahoo's 700 million users, a free AI woven into popular services like Finance and Sports may be the more consequential shift — and this revamped Yahoo, in his framing, actually has a fighting chance.