🤖 Yahoo! released Scout, its new AI search engine, a few days ago, and it has, hands down, the most “open web” friendly interface compared to ChatGPT or AI Mode… and honestly, the best interface overall 👇 I’ve been comparing Yahoo! Scout vs. ChatGPT & AI Mode across answer quality, formats, and link inclusion, testing different search intents and verticals, and I couldn’t believe how consistently Yahoo! Scout delivers a more user- and open-web-friendly answer experience: * Across most answers, it features a prominent, highlighted “Read More” button linking directly to the most relevant source behind the answer. * It includes links to external sites directly within the answers, starting from the very first paragraph, often showing dozens of links to original sources (in addition to linking to all sources together at the end in a sidebar). In contrast, other AI platforms include far fewer links in the answer itself, and mostly push users to a sidebar to access external sources. * It’s honestly crazy that after so much time of complaints from website owners, publishers, and the SEO community, Yahoo! ends up releasing a far more “open web”-friendly interface in its AI platform than… Google, that has supposedly been committed to improving theirs. Although I was skeptical when I first saw the announcement, I’m more than happy to eat my words, and I want to congratulate Yahoo! for designing not only an easy-to-use interface, but one that genuinely incentivizes users to keep browsing the sites where the answers come from 👏 I really hope product managers and designers at @Google and @OpenAI take note.
