Yahoo! Slurp

faked UAs

[keyplyr]

UA: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Yahoo! Slurp; http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/slurp)

AFAIK Slurp US still only crawls from the following Yahoo! IP ranges:
63.250.192.0 - 63.250.223.255
63.250.192.0/19
68.180.128.0 - 68.180.255.255
68.180.128.0/17
74.6.0.0 - 74.6.255.255
74.6.0.0/16

(Europe & other countries outside of US may see additional Yahoo ranges)

Since the Verizon acquisition was announced, I immediately started seeing additional Slurp UAs coming from OVH ranges. These same OVH IPs were using other fake UAs as well.

Slurp may indeed start to come from ranges outside of Yahoo! at some point in the future, or Verizon may decide to retire the bot, or even re-purpose it under a new name, but not quite yet it seems.

[lucy24]

I am now inclined to think that my onetime negative impression of Yahoo! Slurp was in fact due to the behavior of one or more fakers. Happily, the fake ones send slightly different headers, so I don't have to do IP/UA cross-checking as with fake Googlebots.

[keyplyr]

I know almost nothing about what Slurp is purposed for; just that it behaves much like Bing or Googlebot.

I recall reading that Slurp has more impact on searches performed outside the US and since Bing took over search for Yahoo! in the US, I pretty much forgot about Slurp except to see it occasionally.

If it hadn't been for the OVH fakes, I would still have overlooked it. I do have an IP/UA filter. Unless other abnormal behavior sets off a block, I usually don't even notice the whitelisted agents that behave.