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Yahoo may not be the most headlined company in tech anymore, but its reach cant be denied. With nearly 250 million monthly users across the country and 700 million globally, its still the second most popular email client in the world, and the third most popular search engine in the U.S. (even though that search engine has technically been powered by either Bing or Google since 2009). As a privately owned company since 2021 (once worth $125 billion, but purchased for a mere $5 billion at the time), its CEO Jim Lanzone says that the last few years have been about getting the house in order. But now, he promises, this is one of the biggest turnarounds people have tried in internet history. Lanzone says that turnaround begins with Yahoo Scout, which launches today in beta. In short, Yahoo Scout is a new, free AI search engine (its also an omnipresent button across Yahoo verticals like Finance, Sports, and Mail) that’s there to summarize the performance of a business or break down the key moments of a game. In one mode, it’s essentially Yahoo’s version of Claude or ChatGPT. (Yahoo Answers for the AI era!) In the other, it’s an AI-translate button accompanying Yahoo’s editorial content, boiling down articles into takeaways. It will even summarize the sentiment of the comments on stories you read across Yahoo. We [arent] the first to market here, but in evaluating whether we should keep outsourcing or build the AI layer ourselves, it just became clear that we could do this best for our users, says Lanzone. We had a lot of unique assets to do that. And so in that context, timing is almost irrelevant, right? Because this is about Yahoo users on Yahoo, searching on Yahoo, versus what they were getting before. [Image: Yahoo] Led by Eric Feng, SVP & general manager of the Yahoo Research Groupwho is best known for recruiting and leading the technical team that created Huluits powered by a combination of Yahoos knowledge graph, Anthropics Claude, and Bings open web APIs. (Yahoo says that user data is kept internally and does not train Claude or Bing.) Yes, that means Yahoo is still relying on external partners, but the team says that search will feel like Yahoo because its so based within the Yahoo ecosystem. Specifically, Yahoo Scout can answer a question with everything Claude knows within its LLM (and gosh, does Yahoo Scout love to build a table breaking down information!) And it can also search the web itself as well as Bing. But the team insists that Yahoos own knowledge graph provides a lot more on top of Claude and Bing today, and it promises even more into the future. Specifically, Yahoo publishes 30,000 pieces of licensed stories and other content each day that are at its fingertips, and users create 18 trillion events across its services each year. Every event you get just makes the overall totality of the experience smarter, says Feng. Even if its something as simple as searching for the score of your favorite team, thats actionable data for Yahoo in the short term, but even more so in the medium to long term as it shifts Scout from a generalized AI search engine or summarizer to more of a personal AI. Just to be direct about it, you will see the roadmap include personalization [of AI], says Lanzone. Thats certainly where the category is headed, and it is a unique asset to Yahoo to be able to already have that built in. You know, we’re not trying to acquire an audience to start to build that up from scratch. We actually have all that knowledge and that relationship to dip into then layer this on top of. The experience of Yahoo Scout, and what that means for publishers Yahoo Scout lives as a responsive website and also as a standalone app. As a search engine, Scouts white search bar is accompanied by an ever-changing rotation of animated clipart (yeehaw, its quite a cute cowboy hat), bringing back some of the brands original quirk. The rest of the experience will be pretty familiar to anyone who has used an LLM, as every query is less a collection of blue links than an explanation of an idea. From a demo I watched, it really does have a bias to break searches down into comparative tables (which may be useful or cloying, depending how often that approach is taken). But its also less text heavy than many LLMs, because it makes liberal use of thumbnails listing news stories and products to buy. That penchant for prominent, colorful linking isnt coincidence. Publishers are amidst a 30-year mass extinction event, spurred on most recently by AI search tools that mine their reporting and present it to a public that no longer needs to click through to the actual story. Lanzone argues that prominent linking is key to protecting the health of the publishing industrypublishers that Yahoo relies upon for its core media aggregation business. Our No. 1 job is to bridge the gap for publishers . . . [with] a beautiful UI that’s very rich and intuitive but still leans into linking out without cluttering the page, he says. Well see if this is the exact version of where we wind up, but from day one, that’s a priority for us. And then [priority] two is, can we bring search advertising along as well? Speaking from two decades in digital publishing, I know that what Yahoo has shown thus far is certainly not enough to protect publishersand I challenged Lanzone on this point. Yahoos design may improve clickthrough rates a hair, but not nearly enough to support the publishing industry. Cloudflare research on search engine referrals demonstrates just how dire this moment is: For every 70,900 times Anthropic bots scraped information off a website, users clicked through only once. Much like McDonalds couldnt survive if Uber Eats began distributing its hamburgers for free, reported news cant live on if search engines are snatching their insights without meaningful compensation. “It’s not in version one, but we are also passionate about the idea that search advertising was really effective for both publishers, search engines, and advertisers. And there should be a way to cross the chasm, and to bring that model along with generative AI search engines says Lanzone. I don’t know. It won’t wind up exactly where it was, but it can be a lot closer to it than we’ve seen to date. And we are actually working on versions of that. It’s just going to be very hard to scale nine-step agentic processes where you get paid downstream, and it’s just a very difficult model to really scale up. And make no mistake, Yahoo is advertising with Yahoo Scout. While Anthropic has yet to introduce ads and OpenAI is only starting to, Yahoo is including ads in Scout searches from day one. Those ads appear in traditional paid links in the feed (think Google Adwords). Its also monetizing its shopping referrals (thanks to an AI shopping platform Vetted it acquired late last year). These are just the beginning of Yahoos extensive advertising roadmap, which will be realized with more intricacy later this year. Outside search, though, Yahoo believes that Scout living across Yahoo services will offer indirect benefit to monetization. If you are on Mail, Finance, or Sports, we want the technology that we’re providing to make that experience better, and then we get more engagement, says Feng. We get those users sticking around longer, and then those properties are able to better monetize. For now, Yahoo believes that monetization will be significant enough that it justifies keeping Scout free. That said, even Yahoo cannot resist the allure of subscription service revenue, and suggests that a premium paid version of Scout could live somewhere in the future. Look, we have subscription products of finance and sports and places, and you can definitely see a version of that coming here, says Lanzone. But 100% of our effort [for launch] has been the evolution of Yahoo search into Yahoo Scout. And we have the luxury of doing that because we have a really good business search already.
Category:
E-Commerce
President Donald Trump said Monday he is increasing tariffs on South Korean goods because the country’s legislature has yet to approve the trade framework announced last year.Trump said on social media that import taxes would be raised on autos, lumber and pharmaceutical drugs from South Korea with the rate on other goods going from 15% to 25%. The U.S. president previously imposed the tariffs by declaring an economic emergency and bypassing Congress, while South Korea needed legislative approval for the framework announced in July and affirmed during Trump’s October visit to the country.“Our Trade Deals are very important to America. In each of these Deals, we have acted swiftly to reduce our TARIFFS in line with the Transaction agreed to,” Trump said. “We, of course, expect our Trading Partners to do the same.”The threat was a reminder that the tariff drama unleashed last year by Trump is likely to be repeated again and again this year. The global economy and U.S. voters might find the world’s trade structure constantly being subject to disruption and new negotiations as Trump has already sought to levy tariffs in order to bend other nations to his will.Trump has in the past tied his tariffs to commitments by South Korea to invest $350 billion in the U.S. economy over several years, including efforts to revitalize American shipyards. But the Trump administration’s relations with South Korea have at times been rocky with the raid last year by immigration officials at a Hyundai manufacturing site in Georgia in which 475 people were detained.South Korea’s presidential office responded after a meeting of top South Korean officials that it will convey its commitment to implementing last year’s deal to the U.S.The presidential office said that South Korea’s Industry Minister Kim Jung-Kwan will travel to the U.S. for talks with Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick, while Trade Minister Yeo Han-koo will travel separately to meet with Trade Representative Jamieson Greer. Kim was on a visit to Canada.South Korean lawmakers have submitted five bills on implementing South Korea’s proposed $350 billion investment package to the National Assembly. The bills are currently before the assembly’s finance committee.Kim Hyun-jung, a spokesperson for South Korea’s governing Democratic Party, said his party will coordinate with the government to organize swift debate and action on the bills.Assembly officials said the five bills will likely be incorporated into a single proposed law, which will need approval from the finance and judiciary committees before it can go to a floor vote.Trump’s announcement of new tariffs fits a pattern in which Trump plans to continue to deploy tariffs, possibly to the detriment of relations with other countries.Just last week, the president threatened tariffs on eight European nations unless the U.S. gained control of Greenland, only to pull back on his ultimatum after meetings at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Trump on Saturday said he would put a 100% tax on goods from Canada if it followed through with plans to bolster trade with China.Trump has bragged about his trade frameworks as drawing in new investment to the U.S., yet many of his heavily hyped deals have yet to be finalized. The European Parliament has yet to approve a trade deal pushed by Trump that would put a 15% tax on the majority of goods exported by the EU’s 27 member states.The United States is poised this year to renegotiate its amended 2020 trade pact with Canada and Mexico. There are also ongoing Section 232 investigations under the 1962 Trade Expansion Act, as well as an upcoming Supreme Court decision on whether Trump exceeded his authority by declaring tariffs under the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act. Kim reported from Seoul, South Korea. Josh Boak and Hyung-Jin Kim, Associated Press
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E-Commerce
After two weeks of intense political and legal scrutiny, the Federal Reserve will seek to make this week’s meeting about interest rates as straightforward and uneventful as possible, though President Donald Trump probably still won’t like the result.The central bank’s interest rate-setting committee is almost certain to keep its key short-term rate unchanged at about 3.6%, after three straight quarter-point cuts last year. Fed Chair Jerome Powell said after December’s meeting that they were “well positioned to wait to see how the economy evolves” before making any further moves.When the Fed lowers its short-term rate, it can over time influence other borrowing costs for things like mortgages, auto loans and business borrowing, though those rates are also affected by market forces.This week’s meeting one of eight the Fed holds each year will be overshadowed by the bombshell revelation earlier this month that the Justice Department has subpoenaed the Fed as part of a criminal investigation into testimony Powell gave last June about a $2.5 billion building renovation. It’s the first time a sitting Fed chair has been investigated, and prompted an unusually public rebuke from Powell.Now, Powell will have to shift from a dispute with the White House to emphasizing that the Fed’s decisions around interest rates are driven by economic concerns, not politics. Powell said Jan. 11 that the subpoenas were “pretexts” to punish the Fed for not cutting rates as sharply as Trump wants.Powell will be “under even more pressure to underscore, ‘everything we’re doing here is all about the economics,'” said Claudia Sahm, a former Fed economist and chief economist at New Century Advisors. “‘We didn’t think about the politics.'”Michael Gapen, chief U.S. economist at Morgan Stanley and also a former Fed staffer, said that despite the scrutiny, the Fed can be expected to consider its interest rate policies like it always does.“The meetings have a regular flow to them,” he said. “There are presentations that are made, there are discussions that have to be had. Some of these other broader-based attacks on the Fed don’t really come up.”Not long after the Justice Department’s subpoenas, the Supreme Court last week considered whether Trump can fire Fed governor Lisa Cook over allegations of mortgage fraud, which she denies. No president has fired a governor in the Fed’s 112-year history. During an oral argument, the justices appeared to be leaning toward allowing her to stay in her job until the case is resolved.Other Fed officials have also signaled the central bank is likely to keep rates unchanged at their two-day meeting that ends Wednesday. The Fed’s three rate cuts last year were intended to bolster the economy after hiring slowed sharply over the summer and fall in the wake of Trump’s April tariffs on dozens of countries.Yet the unemployment rate ticked lower in December, after picking up for much of last year, and there are other signs the job market may be stabilizing. The number of people seeking unemployment benefits has stayed historically low, a sign layoffs haven’t spiked.Meanwhile, inflation remains elevated and actually ticked higher last year, according to the Fed’s preferred measure. Prices rose 2.8% in November from a year earlier, the latest data available. That is up from 2.6% in November 2024.Unless businesses start cutting jobs or the unemployment rate rises, the Fed is unlikely to cut rates again for at least a few months, economists say. If inflation slowly declines this year, as economists expect, the Fed may cut again in the spring or summer. Wall Street investors expect just two quarter-point rate reductions this year, according to futures prices.Many economists expect growth could pick up in the coming months, which would be another reason to forego rate cuts. Gapen estimates that tax refunds could be about 20% higher this spring than last year as the Trump administration’s tax cuts take effect. Refunds could average $3,500, Gapen said.The economy expanded at a 4.4% annual rate in last year’s July-September quarter and may have grown at a similarly healthy pace in the final three months of last year. If such solid growth continues, Fed officials will likely wait to see if hiring picks up as well, further reducing the need for more rate cuts. Christopher Rugaber, AP Economics Writer
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E-Commerce
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