Microsoft held its Microsoft Build event and announced Web IQ, a search engine platform for AI-agents and so many other AI enhancements. But what gave me a double-take was Microsoft Scout. I mean, didn't Yahoo just announce Yahoo Scout in January, in partnership with Microsoft? Why did Microsoft name a similar product Scout, when Yahoo went with that name and even owns the domain name scout.com?
Here is how Microsoft described Microsoft Scout:
Microsoft Scout is a new personal agent for work that we are bringing to Frontier customers today. Built on OpenClaw and WorkIQ, Scout understands how you work, uses the tools you already live in, like Teams and Outlook, and proactively handles things like meeting prep, scheduling conflicts and routine tasks without asking.
I suspect that was where Yahoo Scout was heading, I mean, at least that was the impression I got from speaking with Yahoo earlier this year.
If you look at Yahoo's official announcement of Yahoo Scout, it specifically mentions its partnership with Microsoft on Yahoo Scout. It says:
Yahoo Scout also builds on Yahoo’s long-standing relationship with Microsoft by leveraging Microsoft Bing’s grounding API. By combining this API with Yahoo’s trusted data and content ecosystem, Yahoo Scout ensures that answers are informed by authoritative sources from across the open web. Yahoo is also joining Microsoft’s Publisher Content Marketplace pilot, reflecting a shared commitment to expanding publisher reach, connecting original work with new audiences, and supporting sustainable revenue opportunities for publishers.
If you look at my coverage of Web IQ, it seems Yahoo was using Microsoft technology, specifically Bing's index, for grounding Yahoo Scout and was working closely with Microsoft on this. I don't know if Yahoo ended up switching to Web IQ or is still using the older platform but again, it is just weird Microsoft selected the name Scout for this product when Yahoo, its biggest and probably oldest search partner, selected Scout already just earlier this year.
And then I saw Jim Lanzone, the CEO of Yahoo, tweet this out:
https://t.co/bDKlUTNb8U pic.twitter.com/DPm6gWHCmN
— Jim Lanzone (@jlanzone) June 2, 2026
This must be a super awkward situation for him right now.
In any event - Jordi Ribas, President of Search at Microsoft wrote on LinkedIn about the search side of Web IQ, the search service for AI-agents - here is what he wrote:
As Satya shared in today’s keynote at Build, we just launched Microsoft Web IQ - our next generation search engine for AI agents. It is a new suite of AI-native grounding APIs designed to connect AI systems with fresh, reliable web data for enhanced real-world intelligence, including web pages, news, images, and videos.Search engines like Bing were built for humans, yet the next era of search will be for AI agents. Some estimates indicate that agents will generate 1000 times more queries than all search engines for humans combined in a few years, so not surprisingly, this is an exciting space with many competing solutions already.
To build Web IQ, our search team leveraged more than 20 years of technical innovations in Bing and re-architected the stack to serve agent queries most efficiently. Web IQ leads across the three things that matter most in this space: quality, latency, and token efficiency - as you can see in the graphs of the Bing blog linked below.
As an example, you may remember Harrier, our best-in-class embedding model I posted about a couple months back, which is still #1 in the relevant industry leaderboard. Harrier plays an important role in this system by helping optimize semantic retrieval, which strengthens the grounding pipeline. It’s just one of the many innovations that helped us build Web IQ.
Web IQ is also designed to honor publisher preferences by default, with systems and policies respecting publisher controls and content access preferences across the web.
The APIs in Web IQ are already powering nearly all AI agents and chatbots in the industry today, including Copilot and ChatGPT, so Microsoft is currently leading this new and rapidly growing category of search grounding for agents. I’m proud to share this important work and to continue driving innovation that is shaping the future of search.
Is Yahoo part of the community?
Now you know how thoughtful we have been about engaging with the community. #WebIQ #Bing #MAI #MicrosoftBuild #Microsoft https://t.co/FGd3wdTLnQ
— Krishna Madhavan (@kmadhavan77) June 2, 2026
Forum discussion at X.
