Yahoo debuts personalized AI homepage MyScout
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Yahoo on Wednesday unveiled a new, personalized homepage powered by its new AI answer engine, Yahoo Scout.
Why it matters: Yahoo says MyScout is the first personalized homepage built off of an AI-driven answer engine.
Catch up quick: Yahoo Scout debuted in January as a standalone app and site with plans to expand the feature to all of its properties, which include big consumer brands such as Yahoo Finance, Yahoo Sports, Yahoo News and Yahoo Mail.
- The AI answer engine, and the new personalized homepage feature, are meant to serve as a user guide to the internet, which is a callback to Yahoo's original founding as a search engine over 30 years ago.
Zoom in: The new personalized experience allows logged-in Yahoo Scout users to build a dynamic daily destination that's tailored to their interests and daily habits.
- The personalized homepage features customizable tiles that allows users to access various news and data sources all in one place. A user, for example, could opt to add real-time Yahoo Finance stock data, as well as real-time headlines from across the web featured on Yahoo News.
- It also allows users to integrate their Yahoo Mail accounts directly onto their homepages, so that they don't have to open their inboxes in a separate tab.
- Users can also add tiles to include essential daily information, such as local weather forecasts and updates from their favorite sports teams.
- Some tiles will refresh regularly, such as top product recommendations, horoscopes, and games.
Between the lines: For now, MyScout is not being launched as a standalone app, but will be included inside Scout and within Yahoo Search as an opt-in feature, said Eric Feng, senior vice president and general manager of Yahoo Research Group.
- Feng says the company wanted to create on-ramps for users to get used to the feature before making it even more agentic and accessible across its products over time.
The big picture: Yahoo was sold to Apollo Global Management in 2021. Under its new owners and management team, the company has gotten the chance to reinvent itself.
- For the past few years, it's focused most of its energy on modernizing its core brands.
- Now, Feng says, it's putting more energy into modernizing Yahoo's search experience as a part of its broader evolution.
- "Search is still one of the most important, profitable and largest revenue sources for Yahoo," he said, noting that Yahoo is still a top search provider in the U.S. "For us, maintaining and investing in search is critically important for our business success."
