Yahoo announced the release of their new spider, Yahoo Slurp. Wait a second wasn't their spider already called Yahoo Slurp? Yes it was, but this new version is apparently faster and more efficient that the old one. isn't that what they said when they built the bionic man? Ah good old Steve Austin, the Six Million Dollar Man. Well this may not be the Six Million Dollar Search Engine Spider, but it is a step in the right direction.
Yahoo states that we can expect a "25% reduction in the number of requests and bandwidth consumed by the crawler." As a result, when you check your log files next month you can expect to see less crawler activity from Yahoo Slurp. Yahoo has been testing the new spider in conjunction with the old one and it wasn't until earlier this week that it was fully deployed.