The Yahoo Search Blog has announced that they have launched a new crawler which will keep the same name, ‘Yahoo Slurp’. The new crawler is expected to be more efficient than its predecessor, acting quicker and using less bandwidth. Yahoo explain as a result “site owners will notice as much as a 25% reduction in the number of requests and bandwidth consumed by the crawler.”

The new crawler was working with the old crawler for the past couple of weeks, but the old version has now been switched off with only the new crawler now running.

Webmasters are warned “With this change of behavior in the crawler, you may see some shuffling of the pages that are included in the index and some changes in ranking as well.”

Any technical issues with the new Slurp? You can contact them here.