[sunama]

According to Google's terms of service, they do not allow programs (or bots), to use their search engine to search for stuff.

Does anybody know if there are any search engines out there, which do allow bots to to use their search engines? Do Bing and Yahoo allow bot searches or are there any open source, less well-known search engines which can be used by bots?

[Martyr2]

I guess it depends on what your program does. You can attach automated programs and stuff to Google search APIs etc, but its purpose is what is in question. For instance you can use it to fetch the 10 ten results for a specific keyword... you CANNOT take the results, strip out any identity of it coming from Google and brand the results as your own... like building a search engine that really just uses Google as the search engine in the background.

Whenever in doubt, contact Google and ask. I think most of the time it doesn't matter as long as you are not taking credit for the results or preventing Google from letting people know the results came from them.