It has been thus since former CEO Carol Bartz got Yahoo out of the search technology business in 2009, in favor of the Microsoft deal that was called the Yahoo & Microsoft Search Alliance. Under the 10-year agreement, Microsoft’s Bing search engine provides the search technology on Yahoo, as well as the search-advertising technology.

If Yahoo decides to create their own search engine, it’s very likely they would first start with English before expanding it to any other languages, making a Microsoft deal for those search results crucial. Yet it’s not clear how merely taking back control of its own search product will help Yahoo turn around its shrinking market share.

In a description of Jelly featured on the startup’s website, the company says using Jelly is a more fun way to search for topics or images. It’s an app that lets you ask questions, push them out to your network, and get rapid responses. “If you have a question, there’s someone out there that knows the answer,” Stone says in a video accompanying the official blog post.

The app aims to capitalize on the popularity of mobile smartphones and the pervasiveness of social networks. The app is also meant to personalize the search experience—it might take more inspiration from Quora, a community-based question-and-answer site, than from Google or Bing.

Facebook is working on its own new search tool, called Graph search, which is meant to answer people’s questions based on information about their friends. And Microsoft’s Bing search engine already incorporates data from Facebook and Twitter into its search results to give users more context. And though it is not meant to be “social,” Google offers its Goggles search tool on mobile devices, which aims to answer questions based on photos. What Jelly will be doing differently is that it will tap into new algorithms to help target the questions to specific networks, specifically using images. Jelly is placing a bet on the altruistic side of human nature.

The app is available now for iOS and Android.