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Yahoo uses the Bingbot at least in the US and Canada to power its search results.

Does anyone have some sources on which bot Yahoo uses in other countries?

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According to Yahoo’s documentation for webmasters, yes, they use Bing’s index for Yahoo Search, and they don’t mention any geographic restriction:

Are you a webmaster or website owner looking to remove your webpage(s) from Yahoo Search?

Search results on Yahoo Search are now powered by Bing. […]

In the footer of their SERPs, it says "Powered by Bing™", which is also the case for localized versions of their search engine, e.g., for their site for Germany.
And when you try to manually submit your site, they link to Bing’s webmaster tools (again, also for the German version).

That doesn’t mean that Yahoo is not operating other crawlers, it just means that they don’t use their crawlers for indexing new documents for inclusion in Yahoo Search. For example, Yahoo operates Slurp (which used to be their Yahoo Search crawler), which has the following jobs:

  • Slurp collects content from partner sites for inclusion within sites like Yahoo News, Yahoo Finance and Yahoo Sports.

  • It also accesses pages from sites across the Web to confirm accuracy and improve Yahoo's personalized content for our users.

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  • Yahoo! shut down that entire operation; Slurp, Inktomi (a long time ago), and so on. Yahoo! does not crawl anything anymore based upon their own word. The idea was that the Microsoft deal adds $500mil in revenue and dropping search operations saves $200mil and will allow the company to survive into the future. Though I doubt this was wise logic.
    – closetnoc
    Dec 28, 2014 at 17:11
  • @closetnoc: Their bot Slurp is still active (not anymore for crawling/indexing new documents, but for the quoted purposes).
    – unor
    Dec 28, 2014 at 17:30
  • Ooopppsss! You are right. I was still drinking my coffee and it can take a while for the tubes in my brain to warm up. ;-) I believe that competition makes us all stronger and it was a sad day that Yahoo! decided to stop it's search operations including Inktomi. MSN, Live Search, and Bing have not brought much of anything good to the table. It may be that Bing finally gets it's together, but Yahoo! had all the advantage that any company would want except for a duality in it's business strategy; portal and search. Portals have mostly died and Yahoo! decided to go that route. Bummer!
    – closetnoc
    Dec 28, 2014 at 17:40
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It seems so. I did some research and I am finding that Yahoo! will use Bing for search period. It seems that Yahoo! is giving up running a search engine despite the fact that they own Inktomi which was one of the worlds larges indexes at one time even rivaling Google.

It is seen as a way to drastically cut costs by removing the most expensive part of search and reducing head count. Yahoo! sees itself as a web portal and not so much a search engine while Bing and Google remain mostly search engines though Google has expanded into other ventures of late. Yahoo! may have been in a bit of a financial crunch and the move might have been thought of as a way to save the companies future though this has not been nailed down as fact but speculation.

This seems to severely limit the properties that Yahoo! has. When the deal time-frame is over, Yahoo! will not have search of it's own and will become rather useless without it. Too many eggs in one basket in my opinion. But it did give Microsoft a 28% +/- market share and a platform to better compete with Google. Yahoo! will retain a large bulk of it's advertising revenue something in the neighborhood of 80-85%.

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  • Thanks for your answer! Just FYI (off topic): There is a rumor that Yahoo might implement its own search engine again.
    – analog-nico
    Dec 29, 2014 at 0:25
  • @analog-nico Thant would be nice. Bing is the only search engine that mostly ignored my sites. I cannot see how Bing will be any different than MSN which sucked. I can remember the days when there where several search engines and they competed. But then I remember the days when search engines became lazy and let Google take over. Google won the war by never stopping work. It is possible for another competitive search engine. Bing expends a lot of energy but does not convert it to anything. They have spidered millions of my web pages over and over for years to do little with all that work.
    – closetnoc
    Dec 29, 2014 at 0:47

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