diff --git a/lib/deprecatedlib.php b/lib/deprecatedlib.php
index 9ecb9b64060..d09fcc0a520 100644
--- a/lib/deprecatedlib.php
+++ b/lib/deprecatedlib.php
@@ -2395,8 +2395,8 @@ function get_referer($stripquery = true) {
  * @deprecated since Moodle 3.0 use \core_useragent::is_web_crawler instead.
  */
 function is_web_crawler() {
-    debugging("is_web_crawler() has been deprecated, please use \\core_useragent\\is_web_crawler() instead.", DEBUG_DEVELOPER);
-    return core_useragent::is_crawler();
+    debugging('is_web_crawler() has been deprecated, please use core_useragent::is_web_crawler() instead.', DEBUG_DEVELOPER);
+    return core_useragent::is_web_crawler();
 }
 
 /**
diff --git a/lib/tests/useragent_test.php b/lib/tests/useragent_test.php
index b81c59aee1f..5196395e5ab 100644
--- a/lib/tests/useragent_test.php
+++ b/lib/tests/useragent_test.php
@@ -29,7 +29,7 @@
  * @copyright  2013 Sam Hemelryk
  * @license    http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html GNU GPL v3 or later
  */
-class core_useragent_testcase extends basic_testcase {
+class core_useragent_testcase extends advanced_testcase {
 
     /**
      * Restores the user agent to the default one.
@@ -1865,4 +1865,61 @@ class core_useragent_testcase extends basic_testcase {
         $expectation = isset($tests['is_web_crawler']) ? $tests['is_web_crawler'] : false;
         $this->assertSame($expectation, core_useragent::is_web_crawler());
     }
+
+    /**
+     * Regression tests for the deprecated is_web_crawler() function
+     */
+    public function test_deprecated_is_web_crawler() {
+
+        $browsers = array(
+            'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; MSIE 9.0; WIndows NT 9.0; en-US))',
+            'Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.8; rv:18.0) Gecko/18.0 Firefox/18.0',
+            'Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/412 (KHTML, like Gecko) Safari/412',
+            'Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10_6_5; en-US) AppleWebKit/534.10 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/8.0.552.215 Safari/534.10',
+            'Opera/9.0 (Windows NT 5.1; U; en)',
+            'Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; U; Android 2.1; en-us; Nexus One Build/ERD62) AppleWebKit/530.17 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile Safari/530.17 –Nexus',
+            'Mozilla/5.0 (iPad; U; CPU OS 4_2_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8C148 Safari/6533.18.5',
+        );
+        $crawlers = array(
+            // Google.
+            'Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)',
+            'Googlebot/2.1 (+http://www.googlebot.com/bot.html)',
+            'Googlebot-Image/1.0',
+            // Yahoo.
+            'Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Yahoo! Slurp; http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/slurp)',
+            // Bing.
+            'Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; bingbot/2.0; +http://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm)',
+            'Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; bingbot/2.0 +http://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm)',
+            // MSN.
+            'msnbot/2.1',
+            // Yandex.
+            'Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; YandexBot/3.0; +http://yandex.com/bots)',
+            'Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; YandexImages/3.0; +http://yandex.com/bots)',
+            // AltaVista.
+            'AltaVista V2.0B crawler@evreka.com',
+            // ZoomSpider.
+            'ZoomSpider - wrensoft.com [ZSEBOT]',
+            // Baidu.
+            'Baiduspider+(+http://www.baidu.com/search/spider_jp.html)',
+            'Baiduspider+(+http://www.baidu.com/search/spider.htm)',
+            'BaiDuSpider',
+            // Ask.com.
+            'User-Agent: Mozilla/2.0 (compatible; Ask Jeeves/Teoma)',
+        );
+
+        foreach ($browsers as $agent) {
+            core_useragent::instance(true, $agent);
+            $this->assertSame($agent, core_useragent::get_user_agent_string());
+            $this->assertFalse(is_web_crawler());
+            $this->assertDebuggingCalled('is_web_crawler() has been deprecated, please use core_useragent::is_web_crawler() instead.',
+                DEBUG_DEVELOPER);
+        }
+        foreach ($crawlers as $agent) {
+            core_useragent::instance(true, $agent);
+            $this->assertSame($agent, core_useragent::get_user_agent_string());
+            $this->assertTrue(is_web_crawler(), "$agent should be considered a search engine");
+            $this->assertDebuggingCalled('is_web_crawler() has been deprecated, please use core_useragent::is_web_crawler() instead.',
+                DEBUG_DEVELOPER);
+        }
+    }
 }
diff --git a/lib/upgrade.txt b/lib/upgrade.txt
index 7b5641fb6a0..c38064a04ee 100644
--- a/lib/upgrade.txt
+++ b/lib/upgrade.txt
@@ -151,6 +151,7 @@ information provided here is intended especially for developers.
   line interface scripts.
 * External function core_course_external::get_course_contents returned parameter "name" has been changed to PARAM_RAW,
   this is because the new external_format_string function may return raw data if the global moodlewssettingraw parameter is used.
+* Function is_web_crawler() has been deprecated, please use core_useragent::is_web_crawler() instead.
 
 === 2.9.1 ===