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 fam …