Free Yahoo Search API 2026: No Official One, Near-Free Options

You searched for a "free Yahoo search API" because you want Yahoo's search results in your code without a bill. Here is the honest version: Yahoo does not offer one. It shut its search API, BOSS, in 2016, and its developer site lists no search API today. What exists now are third-party APIs, some with real free allowances and a few paid ones cheap enough to feel free.

We read the official pricing and docs page of every option below on 2026-10-23 and did the maths. We ran no benchmarks, so there are no speed or success-rate claims here. Serpent is our own product. It sits in the list like every other option, with the same fields, and where a rival beats it we say so.

What happened to Yahoo's own search API

Yahoo did once have an official one, and it was free for a short while. It was called BOSS, short for Build your Own Search Service. The timeline below comes from news reports and Yahoo's own pages, each linked.

So "free" lasted about two years, and even the paid version is gone. If an old tutorial tells you to sign up for a Yahoo BOSS key, it is out of date. The old BOSS addresses on the developer site now return "not found".

Yahoo Partner Ads, the replacement Yahoo named, is an advertising program for publishers. The Yahoo page for it tells new applicants to apply through one of Yahoo's partners. It is not a self-serve search data API.

One more thing, to prevent confusion: a "Yahoo Finance API" is a different product. It deals with stock quotes, not search results, and the developer page above lists no finance API either. If you landed here looking for quotes, this article is not about them.

Four ways to get Yahoo results "for free"

1. An official free API. Does not exist, as shown above.
2. Build it yourself. Fetch Yahoo's result pages and parse them. Possible, and we explain how in how to scrape Yahoo search for free. The costs are covered below.
3. The free allowance of a third-party SERP API. Several providers give you free searches to test with. Real, but capped.
4. A pay-as-you-go API cheap enough that it barely registers. At $0.60 per 1,000 searches, 1,500 searches a month costs $0.90.

Routes 3 and 4 are the realistic ones. The rest of this article prices them.

The options at a glance (read 2026-10-23)

Every figure comes from the vendor's own pricing or docs page, linked in the section for that option. "Entry price" is the lowest per-1,000 figure you can start at, not the best rate at huge volume. For the full list of providers and how each one defines a billed unit, see our Yahoo search API provider comparison.

The biggest recurring free allowance is not ours. Bright Data's 5,000 requests a month is far larger than our 10 calls, and for a small tracker it may be all you ever need.

Each option in detail

1. Serpent API: the pay-as-you-go pick for small and mid volume

Set engine=yahoo on the Yahoo SERP API and you get Yahoo's result page as structured JSON. Organic results carry position, title, URL, snippet and displayed URL. On Deep Search you also get People Also Ask, related searches, rich snippets, local pack, knowledge panel, videos and ads where Yahoo shows them. Treat the extra blocks as optional: they appear only where Yahoo shows them, so check for each one before you read it.

• Free: 10 free API calls on signup, shared across services, plus one free demo run a day on the site with no signup. That is enough to see the JSON, not to run anything.
• Price: Web search is $0.60 per 1,000 on Default. A single $100 deposit moves new credit to $0.30, $500 to $0.10 and $1,000 to $0.03. The same rate applies on all five engines, and existing credit keeps the schedule it was bought at.
• Billing unit: Quick Search (/api/search/quick) is one unit per call whatever num you ask for. Deep Search (/api/search) is one unit per page requested, up to 10 pages a call. num rounds up to the nearest 10 and sets the page count, so num=20 is 2 pages.
• Commitment: no monthly subscription and a $10 minimum deposit. Deposited credits never expire. Promotional bonus credits expire 30 days after they are granted, per the pricing page.

Best for: teams that spend a few dollars to a few hundred a month, want one key for several engines, and do not want a plan that resets. Watch out for: the discount bands need one deposit of $100, $500 or $1,000, and our published bands stop at Enterprise. Yahoo pages also carry only about 7 organic results, so Deep Search with a large num bills several pages. Quick is organic-only, and num is a ceiling rather than a promise; a short answer says so.

On price alone, Serpent ties for the lowest entry price we found ($0.60, level with DataForSEO's Standard queue) and has the lowest published floor of the options we read ($0.03 per 1,000 on Enterprise). That floor needs a $1,000 deposit, so it is not an entry price. Details are on the pricing page.

2. DataForSEO: same entry price, no deposit tiers

DataForSEO's Yahoo SERP API page prints $0.0006 per SERP on the Standard queue ($0.60 per 1,000), $0.0012 on Priority and $0.002 on Live mode. Its own docs offer queued tasks and live calls, and a free Sandbox for testing.

The detail that matters: the page says Yahoo "only returns 6-7 organic listings per page", and each extra 6 results of depth adds one more base price. The main pricing page shows a $1 trial credit and states "The minimum account top-up is $50." Best for: anyone who wants a flat $0.60 and is happy to top up $50 first. Watch out for: the queued Standard mode, and the $50 entry ticket.

3. Bright Data: the largest recurring free tier

Bright Data's Yahoo Search API page lists a free tier of "5K records per month" with no credit card. After that it is "$1.5/1K requests" pay as you go, with "Pay only for success", or a "$499 /month" Scale plan with "380K requests included" and "$1.3/1K additional requests".

That $1.30 is the rate beyond the included volume, not the price of the first 380,000. Best for: prototypes and small trackers that fit under 5,000 a month, and teams that want a vendor with a contract path. Watch out for: the page does not say whether the free tier stacks with pay as you go in the same month, so we price pay as you go on its own below.

4. SearchApi: tidy Yahoo engine, monthly plans

SearchApi sells Yahoo through engine=yahoo. Plans start at $40 a month for 10,000 searches ($4 per 1,000) and fall to $1 per 1,000 on the 5,000,000-search plan at $5,000 a month. New sign-ups get 100 free requests with no card, and only searches that return a 200 status are billed.

Its Yahoo docs say each page holds 7 results and list fields such as organic results, ads, local results and a knowledge graph. Best for: teams that want a printed price at multi-million volumes. Watch out for: the pricing page says you can use only 20% of your plan's credits each hour, and it does not say whether unused searches roll over.

5. SerpApi: the established name, the highest entry price

SerpApi's pricing page has a free plan of 250 searches a month, then $25 a month for 1,000 searches, $75 for 5,000, $150 for 15,000 and $725 for 100,000, up to Cloud tiers such as $3,750 for 1,000,000. Cached searches are free. Its Yahoo page documents parameters such as p for the query, yahoo_domain and vc for country.

Best for: teams already on SerpApi for other engines. Watch out for: a small Yahoo project pays plan-sized prices; 1,000 searches is $25 on the smallest paid plan.

6. Apify's Yahoo SERP actor: pay per result

On Apify, one Yahoo SERP actor charges "$0.0021 per organic result returned" plus a $0.0005 fee per run; a default 10-result run is about $0.022. Apify's free plan gives $5 of platform credit a month with no card, which pays for roughly 230 such runs (arithmetic: $5 divided by $0.0215).

Best for: one-off pulls where you want results, not a subscription. Watch out for: the price scales with results, so deep pulls get expensive, and the page's own price check is dated 2026-08-31, not today.

7. SERPHouse: free credits, but we could not price Yahoo

SERPHouse offers a Yahoo SERP API and a free plan of 4,000 credits (one month with a work email, seven days with a personal one, no rollover). Paid plans start at $29.99 a month for 400,000 credits. We could not find how many credits one Yahoo search uses, so it has no cost line below. Not verified.

What "free" really costs you

Free is rarely zero. Whichever free route you pick, you pay in one of these ways.

• Your time. If you fetch Yahoo's pages yourself, you own the parser. Our own free Yahoo scraping walkthrough has to decode wrapped result links and get past consent screens, and any of that can change without warning.
• Silent gaps. A consent page, a CAPTCHA or a block page can arrive instead of results. A script that does not check will save the wrong thing and report success.
• Yahoo's terms. Search engines' terms restrict automated access, and Yahoo's terms of service are no exception. Read them yourself and ask your own counsel what that means for your project.
• Free-tier cliffs. SearchApi's 100 requests are one-off. SERPHouse's personal-email trial lasts 7 days. SerpApi's 250 resets monthly. Apify's $5 buys about 230 runs.
• Per-page billing. Yahoo pages carry about 6-7 organic results (DataForSEO) or 7 (SearchApi). To collect 100 results, a per-page vendor can bill about 15 pages (100 divided by 7, rounded up). Serpent's Deep Search caps one call at 10 pages, so a single call may land short of 100. Check what one unit returns before you compare headline prices.
• No support. A free tier or a home-made script comes with nobody to ask when it breaks.

None of this makes free tiers bad. Use them to test. Just do not build a production job on an allowance that can end.

Cost at 1K, 10K, 100K and 1M searches

This is arithmetic on the published rates, not a measured bill. One search is one billed unit: one page of Yahoo results for the per-page vendors, one call for Serpent Quick. The monthly-plan rows use the smallest published plan that covers the volume. Prices are in US dollars per month.

Three notes on reading it. The Serpent Growth, Scale and Enterprise rows only make sense once you have made that deposit, which is prepaid credit that does not expire, so you are not spending $1,000 to run 1,000 searches. Bright Data's Scale row at 1,000,000 is $499 plus 620,000 extra requests at $1.30 per 1,000. And none of these rows subtracts a free allowance.

A worked example. Say you track 50 keywords once a day. That is 1,500 searches a month. On Bright Data's free tier it costs $0. On Serpent Default it is $0.90 a month, so the $10 minimum deposit lasts about 11 months. On DataForSEO it is also $0.90 a month, after a $50 top-up. (On Serpent, once your lifetime deposits reach $50, later top-ups have a $100 minimum.) On SearchApi the smallest plan is $40 a month, because its 100 free requests are one-off. On SerpApi it is $75 a month, since the $25 plan covers only 1,000.

So for a small tracker, the free tier from Bright Data wins on price, and Serpent is the cheapest way to go beyond it without a plan. We would rather say that than pretend a $0.90 bill beats a $0 one.

How to choose

• Prototype or hobby tracker under 5,000 searches a month: start with Bright Data's free tier. Look at the response shape first with Serpent's free demo run or the DataForSEO Sandbox.
• A few thousand to 100,000 a month, no subscription: Serpent Default and DataForSEO Standard both list $0.60 per 1,000. Decide on what one unit returns, the $10 versus $50 minimum, and whether you want results queued or in the same request.
• Large, steady volume: compare Serpent's Scale and Enterprise bands, which need a deposit, with the printed multi-million rungs from SearchApi and SerpApi. If you need a signed contract price at 5 million a month, SearchApi prints one and our published bands stop at Enterprise.
• Several engines on one key: Serpent charges the same Web rate on Google, Bing, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo and Brave, so a Yahoo project can add another engine without a new contract. See the free-tier guides for Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo and Brave.
• Unused credit worries you: see which SERP API credits expire and which have low minimums.

Quick start: Yahoo results from Serpent

Create an account on the sign-up page, copy your key from the dashboard, and send one request. This is the Deep Search form from our documentation:

curl "https://apiserpent.com/api/search?q=best+travel+credit+cards&engine=yahoo&country=us&num=20&safe=strict" \
  -H "X-API-Key: YOUR_API_KEY"

The same call in Python:

import os
import requests

resp = requests.get(
    "https://apiserpent.com/api/search",
    params={"q": "best travel credit cards", "engine": "yahoo", "num": 10, "country": "us"},
    headers={"X-API-Key": os.environ["SERPENT_API_KEY"]},
    timeout=60,
)
data = resp.json()
if not data.get("success"):
    raise SystemExit(data.get("message"))

for row in data["results"]["organic"]:
    print(row["position"], row["title"], row["url"])

If you only need the organic list, /api/search/quick takes the same q, engine and num parameters and is one unit per call. Try queries without code in the playground. A deeper look at the Python side is in our Yahoo search API Python tutorial, and when deeper Yahoo results are worth paying for covers the page-count trade-off.

Limits and unknowns

• No tests. We did not run any of these APIs against each other. Nothing here speaks to speed, uptime or success rates.
• Prices change. Every figure was read on 2026-10-23, except Apify's, which carries its own 2026-08-31 date. Re-check before you commit a budget.
• Not verified: credits per Yahoo search at SERPHouse, SearchApi's rollover policy, whether Bright Data's free tier stacks with pay as you go, and any per-parameter surcharge at DataForSEO.
• History. The 2019 YQL date rests on one Wikipedia sentence. Yahoo's own YQL page carries no notice either way.
• What one unit returns differs. Pages carry 6-7 results at some vendors and up to 100 requested at Serpent's Quick endpoint, where num is a ceiling. We did not measure delivered counts here; see our provider comparison for how each vendor defines a unit.
• Our own free allowance is small. Ten calls is enough to judge the data, not to run a project.

FAQ

Is there a free Yahoo search API?

No. Yahoo has no official search API, free or paid: it shut BOSS on March 31, 2016, and its developer API page today lists only Fantasy Sports and Sign In With Yahoo. Third-party providers sell Yahoo results with free allowances, such as Bright Data's 5,000 requests a month, SerpApi's 250 a month and Serpent's 10 free calls.

What happened to the Yahoo BOSS API?

Yahoo launched BOSS in July 2008, said in August 2010 that it would no longer be free, priced unlimited web searches at 80 cents per 1,000 in February 2011, and discontinued the BOSS search API on March 31, 2016. Yahoo pointed developers to Yahoo Partner Ads, which is an advertising program for publishers.

Is the Yahoo Finance API the same as a Yahoo search API?

No. Yahoo Finance is a separate product about quotes and markets, and it returns no search results. Yahoo's developer API page lists no finance API either, so this article does not cover it.

Can I scrape Yahoo search results for free?

You can write your own fetcher and parser, and our free Yahoo scraping walkthrough shows how, but you own the upkeep and the gaps. Yahoo's terms say automated access to its services needs its express, prior permission, so read them and ask your own counsel before you build on it.

What is the cheapest Yahoo search API?

Of the options we read on 2026-10-23, Serpent and DataForSEO tie at the lowest entry price, $0.60 per 1,000 searches. Serpent's rate falls to $0.03 per 1,000 on Enterprise after a single $1,000 deposit. Bright Data's 5,000 free requests a month cost nothing, so a small tracker can run free there.

How many free Yahoo searches can I get?

Bright Data lists 5,000 requests a month, SERPHouse 4,000 free credits, SerpApi 250 searches a month, SearchApi 100 one-off requests, and Apify $5 of monthly credit, about 230 actor runs. Serpent gives 10 free calls on signup plus one free demo run a day. DataForSEO gives a $1 trial credit.