If you’re running an operation as big as Yahoo!’s, efficiency is a must. To that end, Yahoo! has been hard at work making sure its crawler is as efficient as possible:

In response to feedback from the community, we’re reducing our crawling machines by a significant amount with this update, so you might have observed a significant reduction in crawl load from us along with fewer machine IP addresses hitting you over the last few days.

In addition, the company also says it’s rolled out “significant” updates to it’s index and ranking systems. The new, more efficient crawler should improve “comprehensiveness and freshness” in the index while at the same time reduce the load it puts on servers.